make a sensible README for the project

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+# Welcome to Alaveteli!
+
+This is an open source project to create a standard, internationalised
+platform for making Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in different
+countries around the world. The software started off life as
+[WhatDoTheyKnow](http://github.com), a website produced by
+[mySociety](http://mysociety.org) for making FOI requests in the UK.
+
+We hope that by joining forces between teams across the world, we can
+all work together on producing the best possible software, and help
+move towards a world where governments approach transparency as the
+norm, rather than the exception.
+
+Please join our mailing list at
+https://groups.google.com/group/alaveteli-dev and introduce yourself.
+
+There's background information on
+[our wiki](https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/Home/), and
+hopefully we'll make [our homepage](http://alaveteli.org) more useful
+in due course.