A new site named MySociety.org is trying to develop public-benefit Internet projects:
MySociety.org is a new charitable project from a mixture of the people who brought you FaxYourMP.com and VoxPolitics. Our aim is to build internet projects which have strong, real world benefits, and which do so at very low cost per person served. For more info on our aims, click here.
From their FAQ:
Q. I’m not in Britain – does any of this matter to me?
A.Yes! Whilst our home country is the UK, we do not see ourselves as limited to it in any way. We will gladly speak to and work with people from outside the UK, and it is our hope and expectation that people around the world will be able to use and adopt the open source tools and services we develop for use in their own countries. We will even consider developing projects based in other countries, if appropriate funding can be found.
(link via David Weinberger’s Loose Democracy)