I’ve been lucky enough for the past few months to be working with Matt McAlister, Simon Willison and Matt Wall on the OpenPlatform project at The Guardian. My role has been as an internal external developer which has been both fascinating and also a lot of fun, it’s been a pleasure to be there at the birth of what I think is an important step forward in publishing and also in moving towards something which Emily Bell described at the launch as the “Guardian Everywhere” (read Roo Reynold’s great roundup for more quotes).

When we were thinking about demo’s of what the OpenPlatform could do, I thought of one fascinating Guardian Everywhere example that was at the same time both niche and accessible. For 13 years now I’ve been involved with the Cass Sculpture Foundation (nee Sculpture at Goodwood). This seemed a great fit. The Guardian has excellent coverage of the British art scene and the foundation’s website has a really high traffic international audience. 

We launched sculpture.org.uk in 1996. It was at the time, we thought, groundbreaking. I fondly remember showing the first site to Sir Nicholas Serrota in the gallery at Goodwood long before the Tate site launched. The initial version of the site had features on new sculptures being installed and a list of the works in the lovely location in Goodwood. We watched in amazement in as Japan tuned in to our webcast in 1997 of David Nash charring his Large Oak Throne. We’re hopefully going to start going back through some of this big archive and making it more available than it is now. We’d always wanted to build our own news content in but were worried about the quality. Now we can worry no more as we can get it from the OpenPlatform. From Tuesday morning all artist pages and biography pages have relevant news from The Guardian.

It was very simple to do. Content is pulled into a site which acts as a cache for Goodwood from The Guardian. This site is written on AppEngine using Simon’s lovely Python library and the content is pulled from there into each page. We simply search for “Firstname Surname” and filter the search results for /artanddesign. Job done pretty much. We’re building a smart version of the cache which would let us exclude articles if they weren’t correct but that’s a bit of gilding the lilly.

It’s a great example of what Simon said at the launch “You can now build prototypes in less time than you’d need for the meetings to discuss them”. All in all it was built in about 3 iterations, each of which lasted about an hour of which only about half an hour was taken up in coding. The initial internal demo went live within the same day we’d had the idea. 

It’s a win win situation and one which illustrates two things.

1. The power of APIs and providing simple building block client libraries. 

2. The power of just letting your content go and find new audiences. 

It’s also interesting as it illustrates some of the misconceptions about the license for this content and the openness. People have quoted the if you take the content you have to take the adverts from the platform. This is only the case for fulltext. The Cass Sculpture Foundation has always steered clear of adverts for a wide variety of reasons and I’d not be putting them in a position where that would be endangered. 

I hope more people open up this way, getting other people to distribute and take your content is a great way of extending reach. It’s making the foundation think about what their next steps should be; maybe an API.