Rewired State
Post categories: Event,Ìýrewiredstate
| 23:59 UK time, Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Although Backstage really wanted to attend Rewired State, we couldn't get there, so we asked Libby Miller to guest blog her thoughts and experiences - thanks Libby!
I was at last Saturday and Ian's asked me to write a quick post about it for Backstage. Developer-orientated days like this are about letting developers work on something that obsesses them. My obsessions lie in particular directions and this will be reflected in what I did and didn't notice in such a hectic day, so I hope you'll forgive my omissions. It's well worth watching all the .
Rewired State was a bar-camp style gathering - around 70 people attending, and more than three times oversubscribed according to the organisers. The aim was to 'hack the government' - to use a single day to create positive demonstrations showing reuse of government information. It culminated in a series of two-minute talks (superbly managed to minimise faffing) in front of government people and 4IP as well as the rest of the developers.
I'd divide the day's applications into a few different categories:
* Straightforward interfaces to available data to make simple answers to questions people wanted answered and make the data reusable: Where's my How can I
* Combinations of data to create something novel and useful:
* Visualisations - can ways of presenting information make it more accessible and so more useful? for example ,
Among all the great ideas two really stood out for me, and they are both highly relevant to my particular obsession - URLs for useful things:
- a GetSatisfaction for government websites. It's a bookmarklet that enables you to comment on a government website and aggregates the comments together. A lovely example of taking a user-led approach to the huge amount of data that's out there - and where URLs referring to web pages take a central role in identifying what the user was doing. The simpler and more RESTful the government website in question the more useful the gathered information would be.
- providing a unique, stable, persistent and available URL for each UK company. Once you can refer to a company like this you can start to gather all sorts of relevant information about them by using this common unique identifier (for example data about directors from companies house, liquidations from the , articles in Private Eye). URLs for companies can improve transparency by linking information about a company with a globally unique, dereferenceable identifier that also contains in itself the information you need to dereference and contextualise it, unlike a number such as a company number which functions well as part of a URL but badly on its own where it can become decoupled from its meaning.
I came away from this event thinking about two things:
* If you start by answering simple questions, you can combine them to answer complex questions, but once you've made a very complex site it's hard to break it up again.
* If you identify real world objects - as well as pages - uniquely with URLs, then you can recombine data in surprising and useful ways.
The other really fascinating thing for me was an organisational one. The event was smoothly run with the organisers well-prepared, the geeks well-provisioned, the feedback rapidly dealt with (and the design was lovely). The final site is well designed and contains all the links out to the information generated during and after the event.
The underlying efficiency allowed the developers to self-organise within a couple of hours at the start and really get to work. Some people acted as information conduits; others helped out with data and tools; others got down to developing in groups or alone. Many excellent ideas were too complex to be completed in the time period - others fell by the wayside because of lack of interest of one kind or another, but a kind of evolution with a certain amount of sacrifice allowed many people to make something to show. It felt to me like a temporary . The ant colony should thrive and spread after the event's end. Hope so.
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