Francis Irving

This article is about the British computer programmer and activist. For the British glider pilot, see Frank Irving.

Francis Irving (born 1974)^[1] is a British software engineer, freedom of information activist and former CEO of ScraperWiki.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

Francis Irving
Francis Irving
Born	July 1974 (age 51)[1]
Alma mater	University of Oxford (BA)
Known for	TortoiseCVS FixMyStreet Public Whip mySociety WhatDoTheyKnow ScraperWiki
Scientific career
Institutions	Sensible Code Company Ltd[1] NC Graphics[2] Memrise
Website	www.flourish.org

Education

Irving studied A-levels in Biology, Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics and General Studies at high school and was subsequently educated at the University of Oxford.^[2] He received a first class degree in mathematics in 1995 as a student at Lincoln College, Oxford.^[2]

Career

Irving developed TortoiseCVS.^[7] He co-founded Public Whip with Julian Todd and became a developer of the affiliated TheyWorkForYou website,^[8] 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.^[9] In 2004, Public Whip was recognised in the New Media awards.^[10] In 2008, The Daily Telegraph rated TheyWorkforYou 41st in a list of the 101 most useful websites.^[11] Irving together with Matthew Somerville wrote the code for FixMyStreet.^[12]

Irving was also a senior developer of PledgeBank.^[13] He collaborated again with Julian Todd to create 'The Straight Choice', a website (later renamed Election Leaflets) that archives election leaflets.^[14][15]

Irving served as campaign director of the Save Parliament campaign which opposed the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.^[16][2]

Irving 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.^[17] He was later to become the main developer of the site which was called WhatDoTheyKnow.^[18] Francis has won seven New Statesman awards for websites he has worked on.^[3]

Iving has collaborated with Ben Goldacre at the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science on a European Union (EU) clinical trials tracker and software for tracking retraction in academic publishing.^[19][20] He has previously worked for NC Graphics and Memrise.^[2]