Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 – 11 February 2007) was an English scientist and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at e-democracy charity mySociety.^[1]

Lightfoot was born in Dulwich, England, in 1978.^[1] His mother, Prue, was a journalist and his father, Robert, was a patent agent.^[1] His older sister Steph taught him how to program the family's BBC Micro.^[1] He attended Westminster School, where he was part of the team representing the school in the British Informatics Olympiad.^[1] He used his knowledge of programming to produce a crater investigation model in the physics department at Westminster which was of an extremely high standard. This was part of a physics project in which he was awarded a 15 Merit — an outstanding and very rare full mark.

He studied the Natural Science Tripos with a focus on Physics at Clare College, Cambridge. He graduated with a Master's degree in 2000.^[1]

Lightfoot was one of the founders of Mythic Beasts, an ISP.^[1]

He had suffered from depression throughout his adult life.^[1] Lightfoot died by suicide on 11 February 2007.^[1][2]

He played an important role in the development of:

• PledgeBank, which addresses the prisoner's dilemma for all sorts of social-good projects;
• YourHistoryHere.com — a site where people can annotate a map with their knowledge of the history of that place.
• Placeopedia — an online gazetteer that is a mashup of Google Maps and the English Wikipedia.
• TheyWorkForYou — tracks speeches and activities of Members of Parliament, including presenting an accessible version of Hansard
• WriteToThem.com — facilitates contacting elected representatives at all levels of UK government.
• HearFromYourMP.com — a site encouraging MPs to email their constituents.
• hassleme.co.uk ^[3]— "Because your mother can't remind you of everything."
• DowningStreetSays.com — searchable text of the Prime Minister's Spokesman's briefings.
• Downing Street e-Petitions — a petitions website for 10 Downing Street.
• FixMyStreet — another map-based application facilitating citizens informing their local authority of problems needing their attention, such as broken streetlamps etc.
• tpop3d — a pop3 server
• vmail-sql — vmail-sql, a virtual email hosting system backed by MySQL
• Political Survey and — An attempt to generate a multi-axis political model based solely on principal components analysis of survey results, rather than preconceived axes.^[4]
• WhatDoTheyKnow is dedicated to Chris, who thought up the idea of automatically republishing email responses ^[5]
• Mythic beasts (ISP), co-founder of the Cambridge based hosting ISP.
• He also did additional coding on the video game LittleBigPlanet, which was released a year after his death. The game was dedicated to his memory.

• Chris's Blog
• mySociety obituary
• Guardian Obituary
• Times obituary
• Colleague obituary and tribute