Francis Irving

Who is Francis Irving?

Francis Irving is a 37 year old British computer programmer, activist for freedom of information and CEO of ScraperWiki.

Francis Irving developed TortoiseCVS.

He co-founded Public Whip with Julian Todd and became a developer of the affiliated TheyWorkForYou website, a project which parses raw Hansard data to track how members vote in the UK Parliament. Initially risking prosecution for re-using the raw data which was under Crown copyright, the developers of Public Whip were later successful in getting permission to use it. In 2004, Public Whip was recognised in the New Media awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph rated TheyWorkforYou 41st in a list of the 101 most useful websites. Irving together with Matthew Somerville wrote the code for FixMyStreet.

Irving was also a senior developer of PledgeBank. He collaborated again with Julian Todd to create 'The Straight Choice a website that archives election leaflets.

He was the Campaign Director of the Save Parliament campaign which opposed the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

He was one of two people to suggest the winning idea of a site through which Freedom of Information Act requests could be made in a mySociety competition for ideas for public interest websites to build. He was later to become the main developer of the site which was called WhatDoTheyKnow. Francis has won seven New Statesman awards for websites he has worked on.