I’ve used my Boris Bikes API which serves live data about bike and docking station availability and Google Earth to create a 3D visualisation that shows the current bike availability across London.
Movie by Andrew Hudson-Smith, Digital Urban/UCL CASA
In the BBC radio car
Today, Eric Pickles and the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) released their spending data for April 2009-March 2010. (My easy-to-download zip file is here.) I was interviewed by Eddie Mair on Radio 4′s PM programme about my Armchair Auditor website and software which helps people to understand how their councils and the government spends their money. Scrub forward to 17:30 for the start of the story. Thankfully I didn’t get the Paxman vs. Howard treatment.
If you’ve ever wanted to whistle up a pair of wheels while walking around London, now you can. Friday’s launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme puts 6000 short-hire bikes at 300 docking stations within a few hundred metres of any point in the centre of the city. No matter where you are, you shouldn’t be more than a few minutes’ walk from a hire bike.
Full Fact is a website that aims to find the true facts behind the spin and obfuscation of public debate. According to them:
Full Fact is an independent fact-checking organisation. We remove the spin from political statements and make it easier to see the facts and context behind the claims made by the key players in British political debate.
Our main work is to:
- Analyse, challenge and expose misleading claims
- Enable people to verify or rebut claims and campaign for improved standards
So I was interested to see how they’d tackle the controversy over Chris Taggart’s criticism of the way in which Spikes Cavell are publishing council spending data on their SpotlightOnSpend website.
BBC News has run a government open data story today featuring Mash the State, Openly Local, Pic and Mix and Socitm. There’s probably not much there that will be news to avid open data followers familiar with these projects but by all means go and have a read. While there has been much talk and a fair bit of action on open data lately (not least Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s appointment to advise the government) the situation on the ground is still that most councils aren’t embracing open data and show little signs of interest.
Media reports often feature cutting-edge projects such as Kent County Council’s Pic and Mix and can distort the public perception away from the reality that the great independent civic websites using public data are mostly having to scrape and steal it. Very few councils will even acknowledge them, let alone co-operate with them.
Our campaign to get councils to create RSS feeds intentionally gives them the easiest possible first step into the open data world — just put up an RSS feed of your news and we’ll be smiley. Yet only 27% of councils even manage that.
The relatively greater movement of councils towards social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, while not to be confused with genuine open data initiatives, is encouraging because it shows many councils’ willingness to engage users online in the places where they want to go rather than insisting that the only council web activity will happen on the council’s own site.
Despite Socitm’s Better Connected process and laudable efforts among many councils to improve their websites, the unavoidable conclusion is that councils often aren’t the best organisations to create e-government services for the public. Councils’ own websites will decline in importance accordingly.
As more people get connected and want to do more with their councils online, having a great council website won’t be enough. That’s why today Mash the State is calling for councils to dedicate 1% of their web budgets for open data projects.
Why is this?
1. People want choice. As we see with social media and RSS users, many people want and expect to be able to interact with their councils online using the websites and tools which they prefer and with which they’re familiar. And why shouldn’t they? For any council serious about engaging the public, saying “It’s our way or the highway” will no longer do.
2. Boundaries are barriers. Council boundaries and departmental responsibilities are inevitable artifacts of organising collective work but users often don’t know who’s responsible for dealing with their issue, nor do they particularly care. Why should they? IT can give citizens the ability to navigate civic life in ways that are often agnostic to the bureaucratic structures of government and to work with multiple government organisations and departments simultaneously and seamlessly. Fix My Street provides a great user experience because users don’t need to know which council is responsible for the fault they’re reporting nor find the relevant contact point within that council. It works the same way for everyone, everywhere. No single council could match that level of ease and utility. The only way to improve on Fix My Street would be to create a similar system with national scope.
3. Computing is growing, expectations are rising, budgets are shrinking. The relentless pace of technological development leaves councils running (and losing) a frantic race to catch up. Things will only get worse for councils that make it hard for people to reuse their content in ways that suit them and create third-party interfaces to their services. Just as the council gets its new website (which may have to last fundamentally unchanged for 3-5 years) along comes the next big thing and already it’s outdated. People want videos and podcasts, to be able to follow various council activities across a range of social media sites, they want iPhone apps and mobile web capability. We don’t know what they’ll want tomorrow but we can reasonably assume that councils often won’t have the skills in house to satisfy those expectations nor the budgets to hire specialists to do it for them.
4. Councils don’t have a monopoly on great ideas. With the best will in the world, when councils create web services for the public those services will reflect the ways in which the council wants to interact with the public. When the public create web services they reflect the ways in which they want to interact with the council. Which is likely to provide a better user experience? There is an enormous inertia within councils that stifles innovation, often because of genuine risks or opportunity costs. Usually it takes outsiders to rock the boat. When it goes wrong, some individuals may have wasted their time but the public has lost nothing. When it succeeds, everyone benefits.
The age of technological catch-up for councils is rapidly drawing to a close. Technologies to move content and data between applications and websites are mature and widely-implemented. Councils can no longer bury their heads in the sand and continue to act as if they believe that they have all — or even most — of the answers. The future of local e-government is letting people “pick and mix” the content and services they require using the tools and systems they prefer rather than insisting that everything must happen on councils’ own websites.
For those councils already moving strategically down this path — keep doing what you’re doing. For those that have dipped their toes in the water, take a look at the bigger picture and see where the web culture is heading. How many individuals now have their own websites as opposed to social media presences, remotely hosted blogs and Flickr accounts? How many new and recent technologies have emerged in which you see potential but don’t have the resources even to investigate, let alone implement?
Councils need stand-alone open data projects with their own resources and budgets. Lumping it in with general website work has demonstrably failed to give open data the priority it deserves.
Councils may spend that 1% in various ways. For some it will be an opportunity to create feeds and build inbound and outbound APIs, to integrate with third-party websites and services that have proven track records that provide real value. Councils could build relationships with local developers that are interested in government projects, supporting civic hacking groups where they exist and helping to create them where they don’t. “Hack the Council Day” could be a regular feature in the borough calendar. Or they could simply donate some of that money to new or existing projects that inspire them.
For the 74% of councils that still don’t have a single RSS feed, getting that done might be a good place to start.
Ernest Marples is dead and I am pissed off.
I refer, of course, not to the erstwhile postmaster general and transport minister who retired to the grave in 1978 but to the eponymous website which has been crushed beneath the Royal Mail’s clunking fist.
Ernest, you did one thing and you did it brilliantly. You gave programmers a gizmo that converted postcodes into geographical locations. Such an unglamorous task formed the backbone of websites that provided public benefit and private delight in equal measure.
By powering Planning Alerts you let thousands get news of local planning applications where they wanted it – in their inboxes – rather than having to rummage around in the darkest reaches of their councils’ websites.
In a time of high unemployment and higher uncertainty, you gave people a fast and easy way to find vacancies near them through Jobcentre Pro Plus without having to suffer the frustrations and indignities of the Jobcentre “adviser” and the official government website.
And as the cornerstone of The Straight Choice you helped us to create a public library of election leaflets that let us judge for ourselves whether our politicians’ promises were worth the paper they were written on.
You inspired dozens of developers to create civic projects that without you would have been unthinkable and now without you may well be impossible.
At a time when joined-up government was either a breathless aspiration or an oxymoronic joke, you helped to bond parts of government that no council, ministry or quango could reach.
Above all, Ernest, you provided a glimpse of what we the people could do with free access to the data that we had paid to create and are now expected to pay for again to use.
For all this you asked for neither recognition nor recompense but just the chance to carry on doing what you loved. A chance which you were so ruthlessly and shamelessly denied.
Farewell, Ernest. You were one of us and now without you we are less.
One of the biggest impediments to councils implementing RSS feeds and other forms of open data is a lack of imagination about what they and the rest of the world can do with that data. The classic use case for RSS — reading it in a feed reader such as Google Reader– doesn’t appeal very strongly to most people that don’t already use feed readers. As much as they are useful for some, feed readers are unlikely to ever be used by a majority of web users.
Lately, some councils have discovered that having an RSS feed for their news is an easy way to get onto Twitter. They just post the items from their news feed automatically with TwitterFeed. While Twitter works best as a conversational medium (they don’t call it social media for nothing) simply streaming your news to a Twitter account isn’t a bad place to start.
Another option is delivering RSS by email. Anyone using RSS can easily enable this just by linking their feeds to FeedMyInbox. If you’re using Feedburner, that’s got an email delivery option too. No programming, no list management headaches. Feed-to-email is criminally overlooked by most RSS publishers, many of whom commit huge resources to running standalone email newsletter systems.
Now I’ve created QR Code Posters, a spinoff project from Mash the State to give people another useful RSS tool.
First and foremost, QR Code Posters just makes it easy to print the contents of an RSS feed. Despite living in an increasingly wired world, paper is still massively important. We’re surrounded by it and by and large it works. A paper poster or flyer gives your information a tangible, physical presence in the world where it can be noticed and read without using any technology at all.
But as the name implies, QR Code Posters also generates QR codes for each item of an RSS feed. These can be read by mobile phone users with appropriate software. The phone will then jump straight to the webpage for that RSS item. It’s very quick and very easy. See something of interest on a poster — “blip it” — and off you go with the full page.
Here are some QR Code Posters in the wild. We used Sutton Council‘s feeds for news, jobs and public consultations, then augmented those with a local planning applications feed from Planning Alerts. Stonecot Hill in south London, where this noticeboard is sited, sits on the boundary between Sutton and Merton councils. Planning Alerts lets us pull a single feed with planning applications within 800 metres of that point, from both councils. Perfect.
One very useful feature of QR Code Posters is that the posters are bookmarkable. So here’s a list of all the posters we used on this noticeboard tagged on Delicious Pinboard. The posters get generated dynamically every time they’re viewed online so the next time we visit this noticeboard we can just jump straight to these links and print them out again.
The phone used in the photos is an iPhone 3GS running QuickMark (i-nigma is a good, free alternative). Most smartphones can run suitable software. Search for a “barcode reader” or “QR code reader” for your phone.
QR Code Posters is integrated with Mash the State so if you’re viewing a page for a council that’s got feeds like this one for Barnet you can just click the BP icons to print posters.
Whether you’re a council officer or an information guerrilla, now’s the time to liberate your feeds from the web and get them out into the real world. And if your council is one of the 74% that still doesn’t provide feeds you know what to do.