Remembering Mark Longair
Mark, second from the right, Newspeak House circa 2015
Mark Longair, creator of our candidates crowd-sourcing website, died last Saturday.
I first met Mark in about 2013. From that first meeting it was clear that Mark was a rare mix of blisteringly intelligent, thoughtful, empathetic, kind and funny.
We ended up meeting each other at various events over the following year including at the regular mySociety meetups. It was around this time I was trying to form some ideas around making something for the 2015 general election. Mark and I got talking about the 2010 candidate crowd-sourcing effort that Edmund von der Burg, Tim Green and Seb Bacon (and others) made.
At the time, one of Mark’s jobs at mySociety was writing a lot of tooling for making abstract versions of their core products. Mark used this tooling to create a demo of a candidate database. He’d imported the candidate database from 2010 and had wired it up to MapIt (for postcode look up of political geographies).
Seeing this prototype, the 2015 strategy became obvious: concentrate on the data layer and work on partnerships to get the data used.
Over the next few months Mark dedicated a huge amount of time to the project, then called “YourNextMP”. A lot of the early work was done over weekends, with pairing attribution given to his partner Jenny.
He was one of the best people I’ve ever worked with. He actually helped me redefine what I thought a good developer was. Yes, he was excellent at writing code, but also at ensuring everyone understood why the code was the way it was. I’m sure his reviews on my pull requests took him longer to write than I spent on the code itself (this might say more about my code than his reviewing).
Mark must have put hundreds of hours into the early days of Democracy Club. As well as writing code (with Zarino) he helped to maintain the shared email inbox (with Andy Lulham and Joe Mitchell), to build the Slack community, contribute (with Tim) to the design of the elections IDs.
In managing emails from the public he helped shape the tone of the support role in a wonderful analogy. The example he gave, for dealing with angry emails, was: “Thank you for hitting me in the face with a shovel, I’ve never been hit in the face in quite that way before. Please let me know if I can help you with anything”.
After the 2015 general election Mark carried on working on the crowd-sourcer as we worked towards our first set of local elections. The initial architecture wasn’t quite right for us, so Mark started on the process of a complete rebuild of the project.
Watching this come together was like a masterclass in starting a software project. Each change he made was clear and well reasoned. Each line of code was well thought out and clearly explained.
Over this time, Mark and I paired on the project a lot. He was a total expert in Git (a software version control tool) and took time to carefully explain its advanced features to me. He’s still the top answer on a huge number of StackOverflow posts on complex Git questions, and seeing this in real-life was inspiring.
As the Democracy Club team grew and we started working on the project full time, Mark contributed less in terms of lines of code, but he still contributed to data collection and posting in our Slack.
It’s really clear to me how big an impact Mark’s contribution was to both Democracy Club and UK democracy. Without him we wouldn’t ever have started collecting candidates, and without the candidates project there’s a reasonable chance Democracy Club wouldn’t still be going to this day.
Thanks, in part, to Mark, tens of millions of people have gone to the polls better informed.
With this in mind, we’ve dedicated the candidates site to the memory of Mark.
We’ve also made a graph of his commits over time. I like to think that this would have pleased him.
