Several of us from Sunlight spent the past weekend in the London environs sharing organizational stories, strategies, challenges, and blue sky thoughts with the good people who founded and operate mySociety.org.

As Micah Sifry said it later: It’s not just that we keep hearing about mySociety whenever we meet people and tell them about Sunlight. It’s that we definitely knew about mySociety when we were starting Sunlight and definitely knew that we wanted to take a similar approach: Broadly speaking, to use the web to open up citizen understanding of Congress and to open up feedback loops to produce a more responsive institution.

From TheyWorkForYou,WriteToThem,to HearFromYourMP, to the e-petition site produced for 10 Downing Street, mySociety has made extraordinary use of the web to connect citizens and their elected representatives in groundbreaking ways. While their effort differs in various ways from Sunlight because of the different ways our systems operate, their thinking has already inspired our work. And naturally, we are already conspiring to bring some of what they have done directly to the US.