I and others will talk a lot about “setting data free” so it can be used in ways the original owners hadn’t thought of or simply weren’t able to do, usually to the benefit of said owners. Often this can be as simple as putting your press releases in a blog-style website which produces an RSS feed or uploading your films to something like YouTube which actively enables sharing. But it can also mean big things like taking publicly available data produced by government agencies and making it work better for the benefit of society.
MySociety are probably the most well known organisation doing this kind of thing with projects like They Work For You gathering evidence of MPs activities from a variety of sources and Fix My Street streamlining the reporting of small but important problems like potholes and graffiti. They don’t gather the data themselves. They effectively build an interface between the public and the civil service which automates the task. In theory their websites just sit there doing the work without any human intervention.
While MySociety is fantastic it’s really just the start and there’s been a fair amount of noise lately about how this can be extended and developed. Which is what National Hack The Government Day was all about:
Government isn’t very good at computers.
They spend millions to produce mediocre websites, hide away really useful public information and generally get it wrong. Which is a shame.
Calling all people who make things. We’re going to show them how it’s done.
This took place at the Guardian’s offices on Saturday where a bunch of folks took various data sources and quickly build services which streamlined, mashed up and essentially used the data in different and interesting ways.
Here’s a list of the projects produced on the day. A theme I noticed is wanting to fix something that has potential but for whatever reasons doesn’t quite work. Take this one, picked at random:
The government’s www.companieshouse.gov.uk 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 the basic details about each company at a permanent URL. From that page, you can get to the company details on the government’s site (provided it’s open) via a link that redirects you one of their temporary session URLs.
Companies Open House is always open 24/7. You can use each company’s permanent URL as an unambigious indicator when making inferences about a company on the Web.
Obviously it’s a prototype but it was built in a few hours presumably using off the shelf free and open source technologies and it’s main purpose is to simply demonstrate what can be done easily if you approach the problem with this mindset. It reminds me of when we started Created in Birmingham where the main aim was to get creative and arts companies and organisations using blogs to distribute their information and connect with each other. Telling them wasn’t enough – we had to show them. So we did. And it pretty much worked.
This is working in the same way. Rather than going to government departments, particularly those staff who control budgets, and bamboozling them with acronyms and jargon they’re showing them in a very simple way “if you make your data available like this, people like me can build stuff like this, and it’s all absurdly affordable.” With support from savvy MPs and funding streams like 4ip you can expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing over the next year or so, and since we’re talking about data that affects all aspects of society I expect it to change for the better the way we approach civic, corporate and organisational websites. Interesting times.