How to create sustainable open data projects with purpose

There has been much hand-wringing of late about whether the explosion of government-run app contests over the last couple of years has generated any real value for the public. With only one of the Apps for Democracy projects still running, it's easy to see the entire movement being written off as an overly optimistic fad.

The organisation that I'm lucky enough to lead — mySociety — didn't come from the world of app contests, but it does build the kind of open-source, open-data-grounded civic apps that such contests are suppose to produce. I believe that mySociety's story shows that it's possible to build meaningful, impactful civic and democratic web apps, to grow them to a scale where they're unambiguously a good use of time and money, then sustain them for years at a time. Right now we're launching a new site, FixMyTransport, that is trying to try to raise the bar for the ambition and scale of civic apps, so this seems a good moment to share some thoughts about what it takes to build good services and get them to last more than a few months....