Chris Lightfoot

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For the former English footballer and manager, see Chris Lightfoot (footballer).

Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 – 11 February 2007) was an English scientist and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at e-democracy charity mySociety.[1]

Family and early life

Lightfoot was born in Dulwich, England, in 1978.[1] His mother, Prue, was a journalist and his father, Robert, was a patent agent.[1] His older sister Steph taught him how to program the family's BBC Micro.[1] He attended Westminster School, where he was part of the team representing the school in the British Informatics Olympiad.[1] He used his knowledge of programming to produce a crater investigation model in the physics department at Westminster which was of an extremely high standard. This was part of a physics project in which he was awarded a 15 Merit — an outstanding and very rare full mark.

He studied the Natural Science Tripos with a focus on Physics at Clare College, Cambridge. He graduated with a Master's degree in 2000.[1]

Lightfoot was one of the founders of Mythic Beasts, an ISP.[1]

Death

He had suffered from depression throughout his adult life.[1] Lightfoot died by suicide on 11 February 2007.[1][2]

Contributions to Internet

He played an important role in the development of:

  • PledgeBank
    , which addresses the prisoner's dilemma for all sorts of social-good projects;
  • YourHistoryHere.com — a site where people can annotate a map with their knowledge of the history of that place.
  • Placeopedia — an online gazetteer that is a mashup of Google Maps and the English Wikipedia.
  • Members of Parliament, including presenting an accessible version of Hansard
  • WriteToThem.com — facilitates contacting elected representatives at all levels of UK government.
  • HearFromYourMP.com — a site encouraging MPs to email their constituents.
  • hassleme.co.uk [3]— "Because your mother can't remind you of everything."
  • DowningStreetSays.com — searchable text of the Prime Minister's Spokesman's briefings.
  • Downing Street e-Petitions — a petitions website for 10 Downing Street.
  • streetlamps
    etc.
  • tpop3d — a pop3 server
  • vmail-sql — vmail-sql, a virtual email hosting system backed by MySQL
  • Political Survey and — An attempt to generate
    principal components analysis of survey results, rather than preconceived axes.[4]
  • WhatDoTheyKnow is dedicated to Chris, who thought up the idea of automatically republishing email responses [5]
  • ISP
    .
  • He also did additional coding on the video game LittleBigPlanet, which was released a year after his death. The game was dedicated to his memory.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i The Times obituary (subscription required)
  2. ^ Obituary on the blog of friend and colleague Francis Irving
  3. Huffington Post
  4. ^ Connor, Alan. The new left and right? "BBC News"
  5. ^ "Credit where credit is due".

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chris_Lightfoot&oldid=1213854174"