On Saturday Tom and I went along to “Rewired State: National Hack The Government Day” at The Guardian's super swanky new offices in King's Cross. The brainchild of James Darling, Richard Pope and Emma Mulqueeny it set out to demonstrate creative uses of public data and how the government might make better use of internet to engage and empower it's citizens. Showing the government what's possible in this space sits at the heart of the 4iP agenda.
But to cut to the chase, if you only remember one thing about this post it should be that if / when this event is repeated you need to cancel whatever you have planned to be there. Both Tom and I were blown away by the quality of the ideas and by how much everyone achieved in just eight hours coding time. All the demos were a credit to the incredible talent in the room and the skilful way the day was organised.
Sitting at the side of the room watching the final presentations was an inspiration and it was hard work tapping out notes and thoughts fast enough. There were a plethora of imaginative, innovative and fundable ideas and I hope we see more than a couple come into our submissions system.
A personal favourite was Job Centre Pro Plus which allowed you to search, set email alerts and subscribe to RSS feeds for vacant jobs listed in your local area. This idea combined with others like Moving There could be combined to generate a better sense of place than currently provided by most property sites and local aggregators.
A satellite workshop in Brighton developed an idea I'd love to hear more about. The Transparency Machine is an app to encourage more local-government interaction. The app reads in PDFs from council meetings, sorting by date, and the makes them available with details of minutes, agendas for future meetings, and a feedback form to allow residents to ask for items to be placed on the agenda. It's live so you can check it out in action.
I was with the rest of the room in admiring Companies Open House which provided restful Companies House look-up for a company's basic registration information. Unbelievably, the government's Companies House website doesn't have a permanent URL for each registered company, and is shut between midnight and 7am!! Companies Open House is an app that parses company data and gives you a nice page with all of the basic details about each company at a permanent URL. Companies Open House is open 24/7 and you can use each company's permanent URL as a reliable and stable link when making inferences about a company on the Web. It would be interesting to see if the richer 'subscription' data might be set free or derived from other sources to make an awesomely powerful service
But at the the end of the day 4iP had the tricky job of having to pick a few winners to take forward. After a quick huddle we named our favourites as Who Voted Which Way and Foafcorp. Who voted which way, is a twist on They Work For You that allowed you to search by policy as opposed to by MP. They demonstrated how it could be used to create a map that show sthe geographical spread and patterns of the UK's controversial fox hunting bill.
Foafcorp, revives an interactive SVG app by Dean Jackson which shows you links between companies and their directors. Originally based on US originated theyrule, the idea here is to use UK Companies House data.
We're really looking forward to talking to both you guys and anyone else who'd like to put their idea through our submissions system.
See Ben Dodson's awesome flickr set
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