jaggeree

FirstPlaces. A prototype thing for digital inclusion..

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:56:00 +0100

If you want to see FirstPlaces in action, go to http://demo.firstplaces.org/

A while ago I had the privilege of being invited by the lovely Tiina Carr and Joanne Mateer of The Workshop to visit Sheffield and their lovely offices for the day and help come up with ideas around Digital Inclusion. It produced some really interesting ideas, some more immediately useful for them and some less so. Of the less so useful ideas is one I decided to pursue at the recent Rewired State Get Online event which was co-produced with UK Online Centres.

The premise behind that idea that formed with much tea and good biscuits at The Workshop and that now sits behind FirstPlaces is this. You remember events such as your first kiss because they are emotive events. You enjoy things which relate to your passions and interests and you want to do more of them. It’s about chemistry in the brain.

So let’s make the journey online for people be about joy and wonder. The internet is huge, so let’s give them a place to start that they’ll enjoy, an experience that is curated by either their friends/family or the special interest groups they’re already a part of. All too often it feels like digital inclusion carries with it the risk that at some point it would be measured in units of “people being able to access government services”. For me that feels like the end goal, and a very far away end goal too. People enjoying all that is for them online and feeling confident and returning regularly feels like the metric. However if we’re going for the transformative effects of being online, personal interests feel like the right sort of gateway drug to doing the hard stuff online like banking, job hunting and engaging with government.

I’ve been playing a bit of late with making short image based presentations to see if an idea feels right before laying down any code or sketching. Here’s the one I made for this, which I’ve now updated with a few screenshots and a killer slide from the presentation that Joel Mitchell put together with Ben Griffiths and I about the related hacks we made.

First Places Ideas

I’ll put a little video up later about how this all works, but I think it’s fairly clear.

You say who you want to get online, where they are and what they like.

You then pick the nearest or most convenient centre for them. We can add in information about access for people who are disabled and opening hours, given time.

They then get to print out a page with all the information on it which they give to the person they’re helping.

Who go there, hopefully get help to open the nice simple short URL. Part of the project was to build a shortner that was not just for a URL, but for combination of URL and visit.

They get greeted and are on the real internet immediately, seeing things that hopefully relate to their passions. We all get data about inclusion which we can then use to make maps of where people are using the service to get online.

A tale of four Rewired States. Making quick APIs.

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:48:11 +0100

As I was reflecting on the awesomeness of Young Rewired State, in particular, and Rewired State UK Online, I started to see a pattern emerging in my involvement in these fantastic events. Unsurprisingly it involves APIs. The four Rewired States I’ve been thinking about relating to APIs are the first National Hack the Government Day, Rewired Culture, Young Rewired State 2010 and the Rewired State Get Online day which happened on Saturday.

For each of these events I built a custom API. APIs are useful, especially in the time constrained environment of a hackday. They allow you to build many things so quickly. At Rewired State UK Online at the weekend a very small number of developers built a lot of things very quickly based off of the APIs (here and here) that Sym Roe and I built beforehand. Looking back over the four Rewired States that I’ve made an API for, I’ve realised I’ve built them using some quite different methods.

Two of them imported the provided data, a CSV file of schools for National Hack the Government Day and a rather difficult to work with SQL dump of the Government Art Collection for Rewired Culture.

The other two involved just-in-time data use using YQL as a clean way to create a data source from other data sources. I’ve been playing with this pattern since Bonnier Hack Day. I’ll talk about it a bit in a post that’s in the works about Childs I Klimb, a way of telling a story of people climbing Kilimanjaro for charity.

Interestingly each approach has it’s long term pitfalls but all are very useful for moving things along at hackdays. The import mechanism clearly has the potential problem of data going out of date and needing to do the tricky thing of reimport. This is of course if you can find out that it’s changed. We’re getting quite good at publishing public data, we just need to come up with ways of versioning it and telling people when it’s changed. Then there’s the other hazard of import, that the form of the new data not matching the old and breaking the importer.

This second problem is the one which can bite the just-in-time API idea too. For scraping webpages, as in the UK Online fake API I made, a change in the page structure can lead to the API failing. I hadn’t considered it before, but had to deal with it in real time at Young Rewired State, the same is true of CSV data. Changing the order of the columns can be quite disastrous. It’s blindingly obvious now, but I hadn’t thought of it before. Part way through the day an extra column had been added into the lovely spreadsheet of scraped data I was using as a datasource for YQL. This broke some casting and in turn broke the data returns.

I’ve always agreed with the publish early, publish raw idea on public data. CSVs are an ideal data transfer format. Lightweight, easy to parse, easy to work with. My only caveats have always been about unique URLs for the latest and archived versions of the data and also that the data should contain the correct descriptors, preferably URLs for the things they’re describing. I now have another caveat now. It relates to the structure of the data inside and the structure of the table in the CSV, but moreover it relates to how these things are created and curated. CSVs often result from products such as Microsoft Excel. They’re created by humans for humans and often for making graphs. What we need to do is to find ways of describing templates and then validating the spreadsheets against those templates in almost a schema validation form before they are published, publishing that template/schema alongside it.

A little thing to help UK Online/Rewired State hackday

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:14:59 +0100

One thing that always strikes me at hackdays is how much more productive they are if there are already APIs available. It’s totally blindingly obvious. The less time you have to spend scraping, parsing, cleaning, finding out where the layout of what you’re scraping breaks etc, the better. That gives you more time to actually make things that’ll make a difference.

As I mentioned yesterday, there’s an interesting and important Rewired State day about digital inclusion happening in a couple of weeks time at Google HQ. Obviously my mind started to whir a bit as to what could be made. UK Online will be providing their online center data for people to make things from, but I thought I’d help to get myself and other people a headstart by firing up YQL/AppEngine and making a little API onto their location finder feature on their website.

The code is on GitHub now, please fork it, ammend it, don’t poke at it/me too hard with a critical eye, it’s only an hour of very rough work but it does the job. One thing I may add to it is a querystring parameter to split the address up into fields (mainly to reduce the need to parse the return for a postcode).

It’s quite simple, you just do a GET like this and out pops some JSON.

http://ukonline-fakeapi.appspot.com/?postcode=ec1a4dd

You can provide a callback parameter too if you like to get JSONP.

Happy playing and hopefully see some of you on August 7th for a day of fun. Sign up here.

Developing more thoughtfully for digital inclusion

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:18:23 +0100

There was something which Vic Gundotora said at the first Google I/O in 2008 really struck me. He talking how Google wanted to move the internet forward and why they were doing it. The “why they were doing it” was blunt and quite startling, I’ll paraphrase: the more people there are having a good experience on the internet, the more people there will be who would have a need to search, and thus the more revenue will hopefully come to Google through people using search and services. It was breathtakingly simple and very impactful when I heard it, and it still is.

The section I’m talking about starts at about 08:34 and the real punchline is around 10:37 and the slide is below.

This concept isn’t just for the big people like Google. It is a concept that has an impact on individual developers and totally has an impact on digital inclusion. If more people are brought online, who are currently not online, there will statistically be more people using websites and it will be better for us developers: more work, more clients, more big shiny boxes sitting in the cloud serving sites and hopefully more happy people on the other end of the TCP/IP connection looking at what we made. There’s one snag though, and it’s a big one. Digital inclusion is not simply about pipes. It’s not even about computer ownership or access although that’s a big part. I think it’s about joy and delight and wonder, and at this point all I can really do is refer people to Matt Jones and Dopplr and the rubber ducky slide.

For me it’s quite simple. If you make it enjoyable for people to be online, then any difficulties they had getting online the first time, either through fear, through nervousness about computers or security, or what a mouse is will melt away. They’ll want more wonder and will see some immediate emotional benefits. They’ll learn about being online on the real web rather than on training games. All too often in inclusion people have aimed for the statistical jugular about signing up for specific things and jumping through hoops. This stuff needs measuring, but I worry that unless people find the things online that matter to them and enjoy them, then we’ll lose quite a lot of the people who we’ve got online quite quickly after that initial burst.

Martha Lane-Fox and I talked about some of this a while ago, it’s always inspiring to hear her tell stories about the people who have found things which change their lives. It was also really great to hear her talk at Activate this year, and in particular two things stuck in my mind. The first was her talking someone who she was helping to get online on the phone. She found out the person was interested in Craftwork, helped them find things and talked about the delight of hearing the responses from the person when they started finding things that they were interested in. It feels so right making the first places people go the places that matter to them.

The second thing she said, is that we as an industry need to think about website design, IA, development, and in particular making things which are aimed at making the experience good not just for ourselves, but for those for whom this won’t feel so natural. (I hope the video of her talk goes live soon, as she says this brilliantly, but for now there’s an interview with Aleks Krotoski about some of this as part of the Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast).

I’m not suggesting for a moment, and neither I think is Martha, that we need to dumb down web experiences, we just need to make them more beautiful, more intuitive, more mindful of the audiences. More inclusive you might say. They’ll then be far better first places for people to be when they’re online, they’ll get to the things that matter to them personally quicker and they’ll have a greater emotional connection to the web as a whole.

Here’s my suggestion for something that would be a good first place. The quite wonderful, beautiful and simple Owls Near You.

Simple, fun, elegant…

Delivering the wonder of Owls that are indeed near you, and some key modern concepts of the web such as customised information on maps in a very short interaction time.

So what can we all do practically in the short term. Well there’s an opportunity coming up very soon. On August 7th 2010, at Google’s UK HQ, Rewired State is running a hackday in conjunction with UK Online. The details are here and people should get signing up. It’s big, it’s important societally, it’s a good thing to do and it’ll make our industry stronger.

Keep stereotypes of software developers out of politics, please.

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:57:48 +0100

I read something today which I had such a knee jerk reaction to that I felt the only thing to do out of deference to the author was to not post a comment on it, but to share it, write about it and read the thoughts of others I respect. That thing is Andrea Di Maio’s Keep Developers Out of Politics, Please. There are so many places I disagree with it that I didn’t know where to start, there are also places where he may have some points.

What I did instead of placing a knee jerk comment about it was to actually retweet it as I knew that many of my eloquent friends, also developers, through what they said in 140 characters or less be able to totally pull apart at the very least this first stereotyping statement:

Developers would be better communicators? This is quite laughable. Good programmers are often shy, self centered, geeky. I can’t see how they could be particularly skilled to communicate complex political platforms.

I’d like to know if he really believes this statement after reading something like Kevin Mark’s wonderful piece about the Digital Economy Bill and The 1710 Statute of Anne, or indeed any of the pieces on Kevin’s blog. He may counter that it’s one thing to be able to write well, another to speak well. To counter this I can think of many times of being in exceptional conversations with people like Kevin and many other friends who are software developers. We’re not sitting in nerdy huddles and we’re often not talking about technology. Often the conversations are about the societal impact of technology or society as a whole. These conversations often happen in public too at conferences such as the Activate Summit. I won’t labour the point, I’ll just move on to the next bit that frustrated me.

Well, I would have thought that developers might be needed to advise Congressmen, but not necessarily sit in the Congress to do so. I can hardly imagine a Congressional debate on whether to use .Net or Java to implement a mandate.

This seems to me that he feels that developers are so wrapped into the very code-ness of code that they never lift their heads above their monitors to think about bigger picture things such as business and societal problems. It’s quite a simple one to rebuff with a quick pertinent and personal example. About nine months ago I was lucky enough to be giving a keynote at a Gartner Summit on Portals, Content and Collaboration. The talk is almost identical to the one I gave at FOWA a couple of weeks later, a copy of which is on Slideshare. It contains a remarkable lack of discussion of programming languages. In fact it contains so little technical detail that I was worried about giving it at FOWA, however I felt that the rationale of why we were working on the Open Platform and the impact that it was having on the news industry and on the long term future of the news industry was significantly more important than anything relating to implementation.

I’ll not comment much on some of the statements such as:

I can’s wait to see a congressman furiously typing on his laptop to hack the workflow management system or hacking into the text of a bill to change it at will.

apart from to say that looking around at conferences and seeing developers typing only ever makes me think that they’re having further conversations about the issues they’re hearing about using social platforms such as Twitter. This activity isn’t a million miles away from the behaviour of many of our elected political classes (and I personally enjoy every tweet of our good friend Tom Watson MP from the house).

The final point which I find so unrecognisable from all of my friends and fellow developers is this one:

I am not totally sure that a web developer is necessarily a great communicator. On the contrary, developers tend to (indeed) develop rather than use somebody else’s technology. Isn’t the not-invented-here-syndrome something that developers are usually affected from?

I don’t recognise this pattern at all. Open source, the use of open data, commercial APIs, cloud platforms and the sharing of ideas and code among the people I am lucky enough to work with, and see the work of, is the very antithesis of this statement. I remember a presentation from Matt Jones and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr at d.Construct in 2008 which contained a slide which said “Not invented here. Yay!”. That slide for me sums up all that is current in the world of smart, sustainable, rapid build software development. Look at some of the prototype projects coming out of Rewired State at one end of the spectrum and at large scale endeavours at places such as Twitter and Facebook and you’ll see the rolling innovation of building upon each other’s experience and code and then releasing the ideas and code back into the community.

There’s a point in this paragraph I’d like to mirror and a point I actually agree with…

I do really hope that Clay’s post was meant to be humorous. If not, we should start paying attention to a new breed of technocrats that has coalesced around the Obama administration, ill-advising about the unlimited power of web 2.0, fantasizing that government would be something else than an organization that develops and implements policies and provides services.

I really hope Andrea’s post was meant to be humorous. It seemed so full of caricature that it felt like it had to be. I’ve read his writing before and often felt aligned with many things he said. For instance I do agree with him on paying attention to the new breed of technocrats, especially if they are ill advising, but that is true of being wary of any special interest group who seek to influence public policy.

I hope by spending the time writing this I’ve proven that I’m not a shy self centered person, geeky or not, and moreover neither are my friends and colleagues. I just don’t recognise any of us in that article.

The misdirections of NHS Direct

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:30:38 +0100

The first things I’d like to say before I get going on this is that the NHS is an amazing thing. We’d be lost without it and I for one have experienced some of the very good sides of it in the last few days. The absence of blog posts for a while have been due to working fairly ridiculously hard of late both at work and at family. So hard in fact that I ignored a chest infection for a bit too long. Being an asthmatic, this is a very stupid thing to do as I learned at the weekend.

My cough turned very nasty. When I coughed I nearly fainted sometimes, I spent most of the weekend on the sofa asleep, when I got up I was very light headed. This had been going on, on and off to a much lesser extent for nearly a week, getting better, then getting much worse. Something was clearly wrong. Checking my peak flow (why I needed to do something so scientific when things were clearly wrong is beyond me now) showed what I’d feared, I was down to between 20-30% of normal lung function for someone of my age and height.

So, time to enter the world of NHS Direct. As the photograph at the top shows, my first attempt at this was somewhat abortive. Even trying to enter a single letter into the “What are your symptoms?” box led to the lovely error dialog. Graceful degradation appears not to be alive and well here.

I then went hunting for the phone number and called in. The voice prompt suggested that I should go through the online system first, but did give me a chance to talk to someone at the other end who triaged me very efficiently and courteously, clearly using some form of expert system.

They then passed me on very efficiently to a nurse who seemed to have quite a lot of the information from the conversations of the first pass, which was very encouraging. The further questions and answers led the nurse assessing me to deem me to be a priority case that according to the system would result in a GP coming out to me to have a listen to my chest and take action. Interestingly despite being registered at our local GP practice for over 2 years they still had me at my previous one, but eventually after a bit of Google/Google Maps work from me and a bit of reading out of postcodes of GPs near me from them we’d found my GP practice and I was logged into the system as a patient suffering acute asthmatic problems, likely to have been caused by a chest infection. Obviously if we had an electronic patient record system I wouldn’t have had to recount a history of my asthma or of my medication which normally keeps it well under control. We won’t go there though.

After a short while I received a call from a doctor. They first medical question was how long I’d been suffering from a urinary tract infection which was the first inkling I had that things weren’t quite so joined up. I then had to go through the entire patient history again. I was then told that although I was clearly a priority patient that I wouldn’t receive a home visit as if they went to every asthmatic who had called in that they “wouldn’t be able to get to any other patients”. It was suggested I walk to the walk-in clinic at St Georges which since I was in Tooting wasn’t too far, or that I drove there.

Both these options seemed foolhardy considering the patient history I’d given. Coughing left me light headed (coughing fit leading to light headedness while driving may be dangerous, possibly). A few moments with Google Maps just now suggests what I thought when talking to them on the phone that it’s about a mile to the walk-in clinic. Normally I’d be fine with that. However, on Sunday night walking to the bathroom on the same floor of our house was a challenge. They couldn’t tell me where the walk-in centre was or whether a cab could drop me a sensibly or safe short walk away from it. I was then told that if I was worried about walking that far I should call 999. This led me to question the prioritisation. If I wasn’t a priority case for a home assessment, what made me a priority case for using an ambulance for transport to and treatment in A&E. My breathing was very poor but controlled. Eventually after a period on hold I was told that a doctor would be coming to see me.

The doctor arrived within an hour. When he arrived he had a printout with him which I thought was quite exciting and endearing. It reminded me of Tom Taylor doing fun stuff with microprinters which always makes me smile. His first question to me was “What medication were you given when you visited the doctor last week about your throat infection?”. Both he and I seemed fairly incredulous when I told him that I hadn’t been to the doctor last week, certainly hadn’t been prescribed anything and hadn’t spoken to anyone about a throat infection at all in any of my conversations on the phone. I did have a sore throat, but only through coughing and the side effects of raised doses of inhaler deployed steroids. The question came from the spurious information on his printout which I now wish I had a copy of. He assessed me as having a chest infection, prescribed oral steroids and antibiotics and gave me a prescription for more inhalers. Neither he nor any part of the service he knew about could tell me where the 24 hour pharmacies were in the area.

I then had a hunt for a pharmacy. There’s a pretty good Pharmacy finder on the NHS Choices website. I played with some of the data backing NHS Choices at a Rewired State event so knew there was information in there about opening hours and postcode. Sadly there is no way on the site of combining these things to find the nearest pharmacy open when you need it.

You can search local and then look for ones open before 9am or after 5pm. Ironically these filters also seem a bit broken. Searching for local pharmacies open after 5pm gives me no results, even for ones which are clearly open after 5pm in their entry on the site. Map view? Nope… There is the lovely UK Pharmacy iPhone app, but that’s built on a the only official dataset there is, not the NHS one which has opening hours and telephone numbers, but a Neighbourhood Statistics dataset from 2006. This isn’t a criticism of the app, you work with what you have access to.

The whole experience shows more than ever that we have to join things up better. There were too many moments of misdirection of information for me to have confidence in the flow of the hard collected data from NHS Direct flowing to the local units and then from the local dispatch to the doctor who visited. Surely even with the dumbest internet connected phones and email we can move patient histories more coherently than this. It felt like chinese whispers played to the point of distruction. The outcome for me was good, I saw a doctor, but only partly because I questioned the wisdom of having an ambulance come and collect me.

As I’ve been taking the medications and abiding by the bedrest I was instructed to take. I’ve been watching what can only be described as a lot of daytime TV and news. My cognitive surplus deficit must be quite huge. I’ve heard a lot about decentralization of services, putting people in control, putting communities in control of service provision and local outcomes: The Big Society. After my experience I fear we are so far from systems that deliver information well between centralised services such as NHS Direct and parts of the frontline practice-led NHS that moving any further towards the vision set out last week may be running before we can crawl.

Those fears aside, I’d like to play my part in The Big Society, just to test it out (although some of us may claim to have volunteered on community projects for a while now). I’d like to volunteer to build a simple HTML5 local pharmacy thing. I just need the raw material. I’m signing up to get access the non-commercial use version of it here. However I’m rather slightly confused as to why I can’t commercialise anything I made out of it (presumably anything including an advert even to pay for hosting would be disallowed) in these wonderful days of open data and the ecosystems and new economies that are due to be flourishing from it.

All good things... Time to bow out at The Guardian.

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:12:00 +0100

The last two weeks have been both amazing and bittersweet, but mainly amazing, exhilaratingly amazing. I’ve been to Toronto, San Francisco and Washington talking about the Open Platform and the launch that’s just happened. The bittersweet part is that I’ve been carrying with me the secret that I’m leaving The Guardian. You might think it’d be hard to talk passionately about something you’re leaving, but it’s felt very easy been and totally natural, as it’s such a wonderful project and is totally the right thing for The Guardian to be doing. Having my last public appearance as a Guardian person be my presence on a panel at Gov2.0 Expo about UK public data with Sir Tim Berners-Lee was possibly the best way imaginable to bow out.

So why am I leaving? Well, for the best of reasons. It’s just time to hand over what I’ve been doing to full time staff there. I’ve done what was set out for me to do and what I wanted to achieve there. When I joined, Matt McAlister tasked me with building up a developer outreach program from scratch. Part of this whole program was to weave, into the perception of other internet properties, the message that The Guardian was not just there as a passive content provider, but that it was a technology force to be reckoned with. That it was much, much more than a newspaper. I think the image below, captured from the Google Code site the day after Google I/O shows that this has truly started to happen.

I’ll write more later about the year or so that’s just passed and the project. It’s something I haven’t written about much here as I’ve been doing all of the talking about it at conferences, at hackdays and on The Guardian’s Open Platform blog, but it’s an interesting story. The long trip away from home has given me plenty of time to think through all the different facets of a monumental and exceptionally busy year. It amazes me how much we as a team have achieved and I’m currently I’m wondering how I managed to fit in all that I did. On average I was at The Guardian just under 3 days exceptionally busy days per week.

When I joined in late October of 2008 I saw a vision at The Guardian which was breathtaking. They’re a long way there and more amazing things to come, and the launch now puts the commercial team in a position of strength to take the Open Platform forward. I’m lucky and happy to say that I’ll hopefully be involved going forward as an ad hoc consultant, time permitting. The team there is exceptional and I’ll miss them all.

It’s been a fascinating time to be at a newspaper. The structural pressure in the industry has been incredible and while others have been throwing up paywalls, The Guardian’s thinking about the long term future and how to not try and control or just accept the changes in the industry, but to embrace and enable them is exceptional and brave, but is also the only sane thing to do.

So what’s next? Well that’s a secret for now. I’ll be finishing off work at The Guardian and doing some other smaller projects in June.

I think part of the difficulty I’ve had about what next is that I hope what comes next will be as game changing commercially and societally as the work at The Guardian has been, but that’s a big ask. For now I’ll just wish all my colleagues at The Guardian the very best.

Gov 2.0 The British panel.

Thu, 27 May 2010 05:24:00 +0100

I was really honoured when invited to be on the “Four Perspectives in data.gov.uk” panel at Gov2.0 expo. The chance to be on a panel talking about a subject dear to my heart, like UK public data and what The Guardian has been doing in this space, with three people I respect deeply was too good an opportunity to miss. As you can see from the photo above we all took our responsibility deeply and were preparing diligently for the panel.

The panel was fascinating with four very different but very complementary perspectives. Sir Tim gave us the philosophical view and historical view. John Sheridan gave us the deep dive into process behind the data being placed into data.gov.uk and on the technology used, and showed (despite us confusing him by making him use my Mac in a funky “dual monitor where has my cursor gone” mode) off some of the great data and tools that are already there. Dominic Campbell talked about the political and governmental landscape and about the cultural and organisational change needed for and caused by data. That left me to talk about what The Guardian and I have been doing; talking about Open Platform, Rewired State and showing the examples of what is happening around app economies and environmental pressure in the micro climate of BART iPhone apps.

The presentation is below and I hope you find it interesting.

A year in public data, a view from within…

View more presentations from The Guardian Open Platform.

It was such a great way to round out a very busy, but incredibly exciting and rewarding trip to the US and Canada around the Open Platform launch and Google I/O. More tomorrow!

Electioneering should be more tightly regulated.

Thu, 06 May 2010 10:57:00 +0100

One thing that open data initiatives like the Guardian Datastore, data.gov.uk, OpenlyLocal, They Work for You and the GLA Datastore have done is to the world is they’ve made transparent the need for raw, verified referencable data. If ever there was a reason for this to be more the case in politics and electioneering, then this leaflet that landed on my doormat this morning is it. Something clearly designed to swing my vote. Just not as they’d hoped and more away from this cheap and appalling bit of election propaganda.

The statistic in the loosest terms presented there as fact is one of the most dangerous I’ve seen. Firstly, show me the numbers. If you want to be believable and credible that’s the least you can do. Making the text red is the oldest trick in the book to confer danger/importance.

Secondly, show me the source. Did you do the poll. If you don’t show me the source, that’s what I’ll assume. But that is because I’m lucky enough to have a stats and science background.

If I was being picky I’d also say show me your questionaire, sample size, methodology and a measure of relevance. Statistics and data are so important everywhere now. We just have to teach data literacy and most of all to teach people to question things presented as facts without evidence.

If a journalist made a statement like that based on a poll they’d have to qualify it. They’d have to show the numbers and quote the source. It’s time to hold these people more to account. I’ve just written to the candidate to ask for the source and the data. When I get a reply, I’ll publish it here.

So long, and thanks for all of this...

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:05:00 +0100

A view I will be missing…

The last week has been a strange one, separated from family and at times unsure of how long I’ve been away, I’ve been in San Francisco. Initially a sort of flying visit for Chirp it turned into a two week stay. It’s been difficult at times but wonderful on the whole and that is largely thanks to the people and organisations below who I feel I need to say thank you to.

Firstly to Twitter. They have been amazing. I had two incredible offers of places to work this week, Twitter and Stamen. I feel so lucky and privileged. Twitter provided us with space, lunch, drinks and above all in so many ways, company and friendship. Thanks to Biz, Ev, Chloe, Isaac, Ryan, April, Taylor and Robin in particular for a great week and great conversations. You have beautiful offices. Thank you for sharing them with us all.

Secondly to Stamen. Thank you to Eric and Mike for the offer of deskspace, which due to a manic meeting load I was only able to take up on the Friday afternoon. I had a wonderful afternoon in the beautiful and creative surroundings of their new offices, which keep so much of the good feel of the first offices, but are light and airy and a space where thoughts, conversation and ideas just flow. Thanks to them also for a great lunch with Eric, Ben, Mike and Aaron and many others. Food for the body and mind.

Thanks also to friends at Google. Patrick Chanezon invited me in for lunch which then morphed into a part afternoon talking to the team about AppEngine and many other Google technologies and also talking through the morning’s announcements at f8.

And speaking of f8, a big thanks to Sophy from Facebook who managed to get me in to see the keynote and attend at the last minute. I’d also like to thank the many other friends and firms that fitted me in to their schedules at the last minute, and sorry to those who I couldn’t fit in, I’ll be back very soon. In fact, the hotel is booked and has some of my things in store as there was no point in taking them back over the atlantic.

During the middle of the week I hit a bit of a low, and I’d like in particular to thank Kevin Marks and JP Rangaswami for inviting me to a fantastic dinner in Palo Alto where a group of very smart thinkers including Salim Ismail totally took my mind off of how much I was missing home.

I’d also love to thank the hotel where I stayed. The Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf. I was so well looked after by them and in particular Kit Wichlan their manage. Although it’s not as convenient for the Moscone as many of the hotels nearby I’m booked there for I/O as it’s just full of good people who help.

Last but not least, Virgin Atlantic. Last year when flying Upper Class for the first time in my life Virgin delivered such awful service I nearly left them as a frequent flyer (I’ve only ever flown transatlantic once with another firm). I felt I couldn’t change and that has been rewarded. They’ve been phenomenal, from trying to fly me out through New York to get me home earlier, to rescheduling me back to the West Coast when they had availability, I can’t fault them. Their phone support has been amazing, staffed by lovely friendly helpful people who despite the very stressful conditions they were working through couldn’t have been nicer.

I also of course have to thank my lovely wife. Who has coped for much longer on her own with our two lovely boys, Tom and Sam. Thank you Bex. They’re calling the flight now, I’m coming home.

Week #103

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:40:00 +0100

I like many others like the idea of week notes. The sort of thing that makes you retrospect a bit and see progress where otherwise it may not be apparent. I’m obviously coming very late to the party, but was very keen to start doing it before week 104 where I’d have been freelance for two years.

So how was week 103? Week 103 was spent in a strange mixture of thinking, walking, riding in taxis, phoning airlines and generally soaking up the sunshine and bathing myself in the technological ambience of San Francisco.

Twitter’s rather gorgeous office space which they very kindly turned into a Chirp refugee camp

In “Friends” terms week 103 would be “the one where the volcano prevented me from flying back home”. Week 102 was the one I went to Chirp, the Twitter developer conference and showed off the secret things I’d been working on using @anywhere in weeks 101 and 100. Week 103 was spent quite a lot in the Twitter offices, but also included some meetings at Google with the AppEngine team, a great lunch and afternoon spent at Stamen where I wrote this, a trip to the keynote at f8 kindly organised by Sophy Silver of Facebook and a whole host of other meetings organised as soon as I knew of the volcano’s apparent effects on travel.

Week 103 was also spent doing a lot of research about printed newspaper design and thinking about how printed newspapers really work. This is all related to the project started at Chirp hackday and until it’s unveiling can really only be sensibly called “Eyjafjallajökull” since so much of it has been coded, designed and thought about in the metaphorical shadow of the volcano. It will be the second solely Jaggeree product, the first being And I Saw… Hopefully in a week or so we can open up a limited beta of what’s being made so that we can get some feedback and iterate through to a releasable product in time for the summer holidays when it will be a nice thing to have. Several people at Twitter have asked for one, so there may be something interesting in there. Hopefully with a couple of weeks of work we may have something to show in time for the next trip out to the US for Google I/O and Mesh.

Are there "barely game" like things in physical newspapers that we barely know are there?

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:18:00 +0100

I really like Russel Davies’ term barely game. In particular I like that he includes collection in his description of barely game. It feels right. Although these barely games are almost, or in some cases mildly, competitive externally, collecting is always something which can be competitive internally. You can play collecting games by yourself. Wanting to complete the set of something. Maybe it’s a boy thing some would say, maybe it’s a geek thing many people would say, but there is something deep rooted in all of us about collecting in some way shape or form.

I’ll get to newspapers now. The other day at Chirp I bumped into Eric and Mike from Stamen, which is always lovely. At the moment I’m sitting in their offices enjoying my last day as a volcano refugee in San Francisco.

Eric said something interesting, as he always does, but this time it was about physical newspapers which I’ve been thinking about a lot of late. He said he “liked physical newspapers as he could finish them”. It felt important at the time and I couldn’t quite work out why. It felt right though and I immediately had a sense of agreement. Then on picking up the behemoth that is the Sunday edition of the New York Times it started to click. It’s about games. Newspapers as games or barely games.

The end of level boss that is the New York Times Sunday edition…

If we for a moment consider a game, it’s something we play as we hope there will be an outcome, an end point, a completion. In newspaper terms it’s finishing it, cover to cover. It’s the completion or collecting of a set we strive for, that we have at least skimmed the whole thing. If we consider newspapers as games then the New York Times Sunday edition is the end of week or end of level boss, which feels about right. We can’t hope to beat it alone, it needs the help of friends and loved ones to vanquish it. But what this means is that by having a fixed end point, an on the whole achievable goal, it makes us want to do it.

Newspapers online are different, they are to a greater or lesser extent infinite. The web as a whole even more so. The concepts of broadcast abundance and peak attention that Matt Locke and Matt Webb talk about are in play. The news website feels infinite at the very least. You can’t hope to complete it, the end is never in sight, so you simply do what anyone does with an insurmountable task, you reduce it to one which is more achievable, completing a section. You filter and at that point the wonders of the newspaper of joyous discovery of the unexpected are to some extent lost.

Considering a newspaper as a game adds other things into the mix. The sense of loss for instance, of jeopardy. Many games have some form of jeopardy to make the game more interesting, you may not find everything. There are items hidden which you have to work for by making you character jump on a particular point so you can reach them. You may never find them but you try and you’re set goals and targets, just as you are with the physicality of the paper. They are things though, which when they are found and collected, that give you a rush of joy at discovery and collecting.

So it is with a physical paper. You’ve bought it, you invested in it and to not find all of the hidden gems would be a disappointment. How often does the New York Times Sunday edition sit there as a benign and gentle tyrant. Full of missed opportunities and fascinating things which lie within the pages as yet unturned. The sense of loss is palpable and so it spurs you on to complete the task.

Physical papers also have intrinsic physical progress bars. As you progress through them there is a slow movement of mass from right to left, or left to right depending on your nationality. As you read you open and turn pages; more read ones appear on one side and less unread ones remain on the other. The pristine order of the paper is disrupted; pages lie at angles and the once mainly flat paper is crumpled.

So what does this mean for the web. Could you level up on The Guardian. Should there be a progress bar showing you how far you’ve gone through the news that day. I’m not so sure this would be seen as anything other than a gimmick in some ways, but it might be fun to try. Maybe you could level up and earn badges.

Maybe its more about how the newspaper is atomised and then recombined into a finite thing. You can achieve several pages of the Random Guardian and find lovely things you never knew about, but you can actually complete Dan Catt’s lovely Zeitgeist once a day and have a glowing feeling of having read something in total. It comes back in some ways to making omnibus editions or collections which are not just sections or filters but a curated collection of things of varied subjects that you may or may not be interested in, full of the things you never knew you wanted to know and are as a collection completable.

p.s. Thank you Stamen for the lovely space today to think and work.

I want the science bit on the flying through the ash cloud thing. The proper science bit.

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:16:35 +0100

Hello from a sunny San Francisco. I came out here for Chirp and was due to be flying back on Sunday to see my wife and children. I’m missing them. I clearly have a vested interest in returning home soon to see them, but you know, what I have a greater vested interest in is returning home safely. It’s a long game really that I don’t need to explain fully here but if you asked any father if they wanted to get home immediately and see family with some unknown risks or they wanted to get home sometime with known and manageable risks I’m pretty sure I know what the answer is.

For me it’s all about science. I’m a scientist by training. Science is all about probability and testing. It’s wonderful in my opinion. It has checks and balances. You need to show the working that proves your hypothesis. You need to be sure you’re right as your career and your personal reputation depends on it. You need to perform experiments several times to show reproducibility. Often triplicate is the minimum requirement. Finally if you have some way of proving your hypothesis and assertion you write a paper and send it for review by your peers. Expert review. People in the same field often with the same or greater knowledge. People you don’t want to look stupid or wrong in front of. And they can question you and ask you to do more work if they feel that some of it is not substantial enough.

Obviously science sometimes goes wrong. Data is falsified, experiments do not back up assertions. Many times when science goes wrong its for the same reasons Marxism goes wrong; human greed and commercial interests. Scientists wanting that extra paper for tenure or grants or commercial entities funding clinical trials.

So how does this relate to the ash cloud and flying. Well at the moment I haven’t seen any scientific experiments so far. I’ve seen stunts. PR stunts and showy gestures and lobbying. Flying Willie Walsh for 160 minutes on a BA Jumbo does not scientific proof make. For starters we don’t know the flight path. Secondly 160 minutes is less than a transatlantic flight. Thirdly I want them to do it in triplicate. Finally how come they (the airline who desperately want to fly) get to be the ones to analyse the data and as far as I’m aware don’t publish it anywhere. All they do is issue a press release, phone a government or few and some EU commissioners and say it’s ok. Not good enough.

In the same article there is news about glass-like deposits being found in the engines of an allied F-16 and two Finnish F-18s which have sustained damage.

“Allied F-16s were flying and they did find glass build-up,” one official told Reuters, without saying when the flight took place. “It was one plane. This is a very, very serious matter that in the not too distant future will start having real impact on military capabilities … if the volcanic ashes … issue doesn’t disappear.”

So airlines think it’s fine to transport lots of people, but the military think it’s very serious and will have a real impact on military capabilities. Hmm do the airlines possibly have a vested interest. Yes. Reuters talks about BA wanting compensation from the EU, the BBC carries a similar story. In that story Mr Walsh says:

“The analysis we have done so far, alongside that from other airlines’ trial flights, provides fresh evidence that the current blanket restrictions on airspace are unnecessary.

“We believe airlines are best positioned to assess all available information and determine what, if any, risk exists to aircraft, crew and passengers.”

I personally don’t agree that the airlines are best positioned, they desperately want flights to start so that their losses decrease and they’re now lobbying governments and making veiled threats about demanding compensation, which they know will be hard for governments already in fiscal bad times to bear. It’s a scare tactic from an industry which is a wounded animal hitting out at all who come near it.

What BA and other airlines are doing is pseudoscience. It’s a PR stunt and a sham and akin to Jennifer Anniston talking up “the science bit”. If you want to prove to me and others it’s safe to fly here’s what to do:

Fly a normal transatlantic flight pattern three times (the reproducibility bit). Then have an independent assessor, some sort of government flight safety agency will do for me (I’d prefer that there was more than one assessor and that they declared conflicts of interests up front) to take your plane’s engines apart and do a deep test of them. Show the world your data. Show them flight plans and publish openly your findings. If any of the board want to fly on the plane then fine, but I don’t need them to. It doesn’t matter if they do or not as this is science and not PR.

If I today were to write a paper titled “The absence of increased risk to air safety related to flying through the cloud of volcanic ash produced by Eyjafjallajökul” and get it published in a learned journal I’d have to do more than just be important and just get in a plane for a couple of ours and emerge saying “it’s ok, our people have looked at it and it’s all fine”. Time for government to step up and look after the safety and well being of its citizens rather than the financial interests of a few. Trust in science a bit more, it has the facts and the process to prove things.

Newspapers as serendipity bundles and chatroulette for news

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:40:00 +0000

Back in the days when the web was young, and I was younger (as were Steve and Ivan as this front cover of Wired will attest), and I had the rather excellent email address christ@webmedia.com, I got rather het up about something Nicholas Negroponte wrote in Wired. Unbelievably they published my rather precocious and slightly wanky letter (I had just left academia at the time and was using my recently ex-scientist nom de plume, Christopher J. Thorpe).

Fast forward about 14 and a bit years and I was lucky enough to sit in on a lunchtime talk at The Guardian by Clay Shirky. It was totally fascinating, pretty much everything he was saying rang true, but at the same time my old alarm bells about serendipity were clanging away.

As you atomise news content as the internet does and APIs do more declaratively, the bundle of serendipity that is a printed newspaper disappears. He was talking about streams of content from friends being serendipitous but that didn’t quite sit right so I tried to work in my mind the sort of question which would sum up what I felt and here I’ll paraphrase it.

“The serendipity we see in content from friends isn’t pure serendipity in the way that a physical newspaper is, which contains things you know you want, things you don’t know you want yet but now you do, things you don’t want and things you just read as they’re there. How do you rebuild this without just doing chatroulette for news”

Cue mirth from room and Clay suggesting we should do that, and probably would be coding it right away, before describing another model where you look at the content shared by friends of friends of friends and people between you and them as another mechanism for generating a curated serendipity. This would generate the sort of signal to noise ratio of a newspaper, you read The Guardian as it has a tone and a window on the world you like and agree with, it brings you things you like and some other things.

Well fast forward a few hours and my rather clever colleague at The Guardian, Daniel Vydra had made the simpler one; The Random Guardian. And it’s lovely and brings you things in an almost John Peel like curated randomness and mayhem type way.

I loved Paul Carvill’s comment…

@jaggeree it’s no chatroulette; i haven’t seen any penises yet

Give it time. In the archive there are only 2888 search items out of over a million-and-a-bit which match that term, therefore the statistical likelihood of an article on penises appearing in a random selection of today’s stories is quite small. And also as Tom Hume so sagely pointed out in his analysis of The Guardian’s swear word patterns using the API - Cock is flat. (excellent discussion here)

I also really liked what Tim Davies said:

http://random-guardian.appspot.com/ really is strangely addictive. Random button for the iPhone app? Then I’d never get anything done.

For me one of the real reasons why the iPhone app works so well is that it leads you into parts of the newspaper the more directed browsing and search don’t. Likewise Dan Catt and Meg Pickard’s wonderful Zeitgeist does similar things.

For people who think that paywalls or the iPad are the things that will be the magic bullet that saves the newspaper industry from falling over a cliff I think there’s an easier answer; more random/serendipity please. If you take me to unknown places I’ll read more and I’ll spend more time, be more engaged, you can target me better and I’ll love you and buy things.

Bring me wonder and magic and I’ll love you forever. I still buy Wired for that very reason, although for me the jury is still out on the CD-ROM reinvented iPad demo they did the other day. I won’t link to it, you’ll only be disappointed, it’s not the future, this is.

My Ada Lovelace Day Heroines for 2010

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:43:00 +0000

This year for me it’s all about three women, who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing working in transforming different bits of government service provision; Emma Mulqueeny, Martha Lane Fox and Emer Coleman. All three of them are doing amazing things and doing it with a combination of sincerity, tact, sensitivity, sheer bloody-mindedness, where need be, and above all humility.

They’re shining examples of why we need women in technology. They may not be coders, but they understand the transformational effects of technology on people and moreover on people’s lives mediating their interaction with government and society.

In testosterone driven technology teams the end user is often forgotten, subservient to a user story that may or may not be relevant to them. All too often the characteristics of the developer is believed to be that of the user; a gap which is never further from the truth than in public facing government IT services.

What Martha, Emer and Emma are doing is pushing forward the agenda on government data and government as a platform with the aim of serving users better, considering those who may be digitally excluded or just unable to use the government website they encounter. It’s not just a female trait at all, there are many others like Steph Gray and Paul Clarke who are very adept. The difference is that my heroines of this year have defeated the ceilings which sadly still exist to be in a position where they really can make a difference.

I’d love to see more women in technology. The role of people like Emer, Emma and Martha is so vital in making sure that we make the most of the value of people and the value of technology. We need more of these three, sadly I think we’ll have to clone them as they’re all utterly one of a kind and it’s a privilege and a joy to see them do what they do.

There’s one more important heroine I think of in the same way, and that is Alex Butler who is, wherever she can, breaking down the silos of procurement and is thus making it possible for smaller more user centric teams to deliver the services to people that Emma, Martha and Emer are dreaming of. If these four wonderful people get their way, people’s interactions with government, both nationally and locally in London will be so much richer and easier. Thank you, you four.

Making pregnancy information playable.

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:23:00 +0000

Early this morning something capped a surreal few days. The Prime Minister mentioned the game that a few of us made at Rewired State dotgovlabs. I guess now Gordon Brown has mentioned it, we probably have to really do it as a proper product, but for now let’s just think about the why and what of The Bump Game.

It all started off with dotgovlabs and Rewired State organising a 2 day prototyping session, one of the tracks of which was about pregnancy and becoming a parent.This is a subject close to my heart being a dad of two. One thing is clear though, second time round is much easier, partly because you know where your knowledge gaps are and you know roughly where you might find the information. To express this in terms of a Bush-ism:

You don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t yet know what you may need to know but you don’t know yet.

This is expressed best in the Maslow’s Four Stages of Learning. Parents start in Unconscious Incompetence and you hope in any learning or training exercise to lead them from there to Conscious Incompetence and then into Conscious Competence. If you’re doing a stellar job you may get them to Unconscious Competence but that is often a state reinforced by practical skills and learning by doing.

Pregnancy is one of those points in life where skills and learning/knowledge gaps become immediately obvious. As does the largely immutable deadline. The government has a wealth of information in NHS Choices. The information is great, if verbose and the navigation is pretty good. Trouble is it’s not very user or context sensitive. That’s not NHS Choices’ fault, but it is their problem. If you don’t know what you’re browsing for and you don’t know what you’re searching for how can you use it? This was the problem we set to overcome.

What we needed was to generate a serendipity engine. People find out the things they don’t know they need to know best via serendipitous means and when interleaved with things they do know. The art of good training is to draw out what people do know by intermingling things they may know with things they don’t. Some boardgames do this well (as does good quality radio, well made televisions schedules, good newspapers etc). Who hasn’t emerged from playing Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble without learning something. So there was the starting point, a boardgame about pregnancy.

Gorgeous image from into_the_fray

So arriving at dotgovlabs with the half baked idea of a bastard child of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly, the parenting edition, I met several people who thought there was something in there that could be teased out more. Through the wonderful team that emerged, Tim, Phillip, Ivo, Daniel, Josh, Isabell what became The Bump Game emerged. A game where you’re trying to get to the end of the board ahead of your bump which moves forward one space metronomically every time you take a turn. It’s a two player collaborative game, with the mother to be and the partner playing as a team taking it in turns to ask questions. The rules can be found here in Phillip’s lovely blog post.

Each of the cards is a miniature and fun information leaflet in itself and carries a shortened weblink to more information making it instantly a physical link between the offline and online worlds (and yes we did suggest that nhs.uk could make a good URL shortener, playing with the NHS Choices URLs early on showed that if printed no one would type them in successfully).

Some of the cards revolve around your postcode, telling you and questioning you about the services nearest to you (fantastic work from Tim). They pull in data from different parts of data.gov.uk, some of the services made available to us for the weekend and also, for the version to come, some other parts of the web to make the game truly relevant and truly empowering. For some mothers-to-be this could be the first time the internet or information from the internet touches them so we wanted it to be pertinent and to give you places to go next rather than to just drop you in the middle of a website without a torch or a map. It draws a lot from thinking about the work that Martha Lane Fox is doing on digital inclusion and how to try and give people first places of information where the value of being online is shown, in this case printed and in black and white - show, don’t tell. They also have maps on and so can serve other purposes. For the mother-to-be or partner in the game having a map that fits in your wallet of where the appointments will be is of exceptional use.

On day 2 I worked a lot on scraping data and the Facebook game element, in some ways I wished I hadn’t. We didn’t show it as time was short and it was glitchy in places. Playing it through also shows you the wonder of gameplay in the real world. It was a copy of the game mechanic. You signed up and asked a partner to play and then you took turns with the bump moving on, but so much was lost through playing online. The conversations which started as a result of playtesting the physical cards never had the space and the gameplay felt hollow, being in the same place and in the same shared experience, your partner asking you the question, telling you if you were right or not and then the conversation which emerged are almost as important as the information delivered itself. Many questions and answers lead to choices. The question on ante-natal classes could lead to an invitation to go to them and so forth. This gets lost in the online version and much more work would be needed to make it really feel right. It may however have another use as the game does as part of lifeskills classes in schools.

So what next, watch this and many other spaces, I think this is a go project.

PlaceHoldr : On what we read where...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:57:00 +0000

So the thing I should probably have focussed on a little bit more at Bonnier Hackday was this. It could have been so much more and hopefully, with a little bit of thinking and a bit of effort, it can be. By half-way through the hackday everything was working and instead of polishing and honing an idea, I made other things. Mea culpa, and I won’t be doing that again (although I think they’re all interesting too).

I’m calling it placeholdr.me as often at a Hackday you can’t think of a name and end up with a placeholder one. So this is my placeholder one and since it is about holding place…

OK, I’ll back up. I think we’re entering a phase where the information we get from our current analytics isn’t really going to help us understand audiences so well. There’s so much more we can learn. For some background, Pretty, Pertinent and Polite is the canon. We’ll have people reading on devices that are wirelessly connected and know their location, but we won’t know where they are or what they’re reading where if we rely on our paltry arsenal of server logs which use IP addresses to guestimate locations. We’ll have a lot of sensors trying to tell us things, but it’ll be like our analytics are wearing earplugs.

We all read at a point in space and time. And we all read something on something, be it a magazine or an iPhone, a web browser or an iPad. Some of these devices know where they are and their orientation and possibly even their angle of tilt and could tell us so we get a better picture of our audience and can think more about them as we design services and try to understand them more.

So this was the thinking behing placeholdr, some simple service that could tell you something about what people are reading where and on what. The prototype is very simple. I’ll try and work out how to geo restrict one component of it to the Stockholm area and then set it into the wild so that people can play and not totally muddy the data pool. I’ll also work a bit more on making a less localised service.

So how does it work? Well for a hackday I wasn’t going to manage to get Dagens Nyheter to use some calls to an experimental API, that’s all it is; it’s an API for you to post location and what is being read to, well maybe there’s a bit more hidden in there too. What I did was write a simple proxy which in a horribly hacky way fixed all of the image links to be absolute ones with the domain fully qualified and made all of the content and navigation links go through the proxy. Then I added a little status bar at the top and some JavaScript which detects whether the browser is location aware and then posts to the API. There’s also a little status call using the lovely YQL Geo Javascript library from Christian Heilmann.

On the server side, there’s some asynchronous processing of the raw “marks” to yield the likely platform, location details and some information about the content. This allows in the very crude demo to say in which locations people read more about say sport, or culture, or business, or restaurants. Obviously publishers can use this data to inform their thinking about location based interfaces (floating the most often viewed content in a location up higher in a page). The could use it to inform where they buy print advertising (fish where the fish you know will bite are). The completely obvious thing is geo based advertising, but I have to admit I’d like to see a really good example of that, I’m still a sceptic. Most of all it would let you know more about your most precious asset, your readers.

I’ll be fleshing out some richer prototypes in the next week or so and I’ll keep writing up progress here for now before transitioning over to a blog of it’s own in the next few days. If you’re in Stockholm and want to play with what’s there (and give me more data to play with, please do let me know.

Right, plane about to board at Arlanda, time for adding an outlier, I can’t resist before I’m totally out of range.

Collating and exploring a hashtag

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:55:13 +0000

For a while now with bits of technology I’ve written for The Guardian both in curating conversations and collating and whitelisting people talking about a subject, I’ve been interested in sentiment and identity and who talks about what and in finding ways of seeing the data and letting people search it.

As a small illustration for my talk at the start of Bonnier Hackday I rewrote part of the twitterfall app that I’d built for Activate. I then bolted onto it some faceting around people and also added a fulltext search using AppEngine’s secret weapon the SearchableModel.

I’ll try and document and clean up the code and then send it up to GitHub for people to play with.

This is basically what the app does:

It hoovers everything with a relevant hashtag and keeps hoovering through the magic of cron and the task queue.
It lets you explore who said the most and what they said.
It also lets you search for a phrase within that hashtag.

It is a simple thing, the product of about 5 hours work, but has a lot of interesting learning for some bigger things which are being called Project 3 at ninety10group.

Bonnier Hackday

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:27:17 +0000

I’ve spent the last 2 days in sunny Stockholm (still with some snow around) at one of the most wonderful hackdays I’ve been to. Partly it was wonderful through not having to do any of the organising (compared to events we have at The Guardian), that job was wonderfully done by the lovely Paulina Söderlund Modlitba.

It was also wonderful through the beautiful surroundings of the Bonnier offices in Stockholm which are always a joy and privilege to visit. It was great though through the people that were there, such a great group of developers and service designers who made some great things.

I should have probably concentrated on just one thing (actually I definitely should), rather than the four that almost emerged, but there are some germs of ideas to continue on and one I’ll describe in detail next.

Anyone who says publishing and media companies can’t innovate is generalising to the detriment of people like Bonnier. Vast number of companies are hanging on to their legacy, Bonnier is building its future legacy and is doing it in a lovely collaborative and friendly way.

Oh, and the most healthy and tasty catering I’ve ever seen at a hackday, although I’m glad the coffee and sugary drinks kept coming.

In my mind there was a clear winner, the beautiful Pictoriala from the CitySounds.fm team. I’m hoping that one develops. Just a beautiful serendipitous way of exploring the news that reminded me of a colour magazine and a coffee table book and a newspaper all at once.

Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital Inclusion

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:55:29 +0000

I seem to have a bit of a problem sometimes with Apple keynotes. Apart from the high end pro kit I have a bit of a “meh” response at first and then a blinding epiphany which leads at some point to understanding why I’ll be buying and then often making things that work/run on them. The original iPod was a case in point. At some Apple shindig after the announcement there were Apple staff with shiny new bricks of musical joy asking if I wanted to play. I couldn’t see the point but 5 different ones and 2 iPhones later I wonder why I was so short sighted.

It took less time this time round and it is clear to me that the IPad is just what is needed in the digital inclusion space. When the Wii launched it revolutionised not just gaming, but who plays and who buys. The Nintendo DS is similar too. It’s gesture based interface with physical cause and effect made it simpler to learn to play and eased the on ramp.

The real world is all about gestures. We turn a page. We swish a piece of paper out of the way to see what is below. We press a button and the kettle boils. In none of these do I have to learn an arcane combination of buttons to press on an overburdened controller, nor do I have to learn that if I do something on a peripheral connected to the thing that something will happen.

The iPhone feels very natural. I tap and things happen. I swipe and things move. If I want to get fancy and I want to stretch something I tug at the corners and pull them as if they’re a piece of elastic. It’s child’s play. Literally.

I knew I was seeing something interesting when my son started working out what to do with Dad’s iPhone aged just about one. When he got cross with a screen in a museum which didn’t swipe it became very clear that these interfaces feel right. Sure he’s young and learning about cause and effect and that it’s different for older people, but the adoption of the Wii and DS in audiences outside of the core gamer market would point and say that gesture based interfaces are easier and more fun.

So onto inclusion. It’s complex. If you spend any time listening to Martha Lane Fox who is doing great work in this space you’ll get how complex it is, but how vital it is too. One of the largest excluded groups are pensioners who struggle to get online for many reasons social, economic and technical. If we just focus on the last one for a moment you’ll see where I’m going.

The first main problem they have technically is that computers look complex. They have lots of things you plug into other things. Every thing has an arcane name, very few of these names really relate to their function. Each of these things causes something to happen but not in an obvious touch the thing and something happens to it way. It’s always at one removed. When you add in connecting the overarching thing to the internet then it becomes an activity of worry and confusion. My own septugenarian parents are now digitally included, but it’s been quite a journey and still is. Often I have to talk them through menus and dialogue boxes over the phone and I’m glad they have a local computer shop who play a great part in helping them to be not just included but really engaged online. Compare and contrast to how quickly they get the Nintendo DS and you’ll see that even all-in-one computes like the iMac and eMac that they have are really not all-in-one or easy. They’re just a bit easier. Sure they could have a laptop which would be all in one, but even that isn’t as intuitive as a well designed tablet OS and UI.

Then you look at the iPhone and iPad. It really is all-in-one. Sure it lacks USB ports, but actually lots of people don’t need them to much. It comes with a mechanism of internet access built in and the 3G one is essentially a “charge it up and play” inclusion device. It’s fairly cheap too. Not much more than a netbook which would be much more of a drain on mentoring resources to get people up and running. Sure you can tell me that you’re not equipping people with workplace digital skills with these things, but that’s not the issue in a lot of the inclusion agenda. It’s getting people access to services that will make a difference to their lives. Services that socially engage them, that bring them savings, that bring them government and local services.

It has another advantage over an all in one computer for this generation, or a set top box like BBC Canvas. You can sit anywhere and use it and bring it as close to you and almost as far away as you need (although you may need glasses). You don’t have to sit at a desk when you have a comfortable and possibly orthopedic chair. If you’re bedridden you could possibly use it. There’s no trying to squint at a TV which you’d have to do with a Canvas like box. I’m lucky enough to have a reasonable sized TV at home connected to a MacMini, it’s still an awful experience of browsing. This isn’t what you want people’s first experiences of the internet to be, they’ll stay excluded and the box will sit in the corner of their room hemorrhaging value. Their first experience should be fun and immediate and intuitive and personal. There is in my mind nothing more personal than holding the device and touching the device that brings you services, it will seem more like magic and less like a struggle.

Many people will criticise the iPad for being a walled garden, but it has the open internet so for developers that’s not so much of an issue. In my opinion, and this is the only time you’re likely to hear me say this, a walled garden may be an advantage in the inclusion space. The apps that people can download have gone through some form of approval process. It’s a combination of hardware and software from the same provider so there is more chance of it working with less configuration issues which will impede smooth access. Also iPhone apps tend to be a lot simpler with less menus than apps on desktop machines, this will reduce the workload of either family or institutional mentors and helpdesks.

The other thing about it is that it does the things simply that lots of the excluded would love to do. Internet browsing, pictures of grandchildren, delivery of services, delivery of content. All too often inclusion programmes seem to go straight for the endgame. Getting people skilled up to organise their interaction with government online. That’s important, but maybe we should get people doing the stuff which will bring emotional, social and connectedness value first. They’ll then get engaged and will enjoy it and will have learnt core skills for when you want them to do the harder stuff like filling out forms and engaging with government.

Sure it’s not a complete panacea and it won’t be for everyone, but I’d love to see a trial. The government could even eventually become a mobile network operator or virtual mobile network operator to ensure secure access (I’d worry about man in the middle attacks on municipal WiFi on people who were vulnerable and not skilled enough to notice it). It would also be a good way of making sure that the device just works from the moment it comes out of the box and is handed to the individual. If you have problems with 3G signals in certain areas these could quite easily be fixed with femtocells.

In my opinion the iPad could have so much more of an impact in this space than the one all of the media outlets seem to be looking at. The hype about it saving the media industry and the newspaper industry feels a bit like straw clutching by an industry that’s doing too much hand wringing and looking for a magic bullet to appear from someone else. As my colleague at The Guardian Matt Wall pointed out this morning.

First day in the Brave New World. So far the iPad hasn’t saved the newspaper industry. Guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.

It may not be a Jesus phone, a Moses tablet or something that lives up to hype and hyperbole, but if it does something for the digital inclusion agenda it might live up to Steve Jobs saying it’s the most important thing he’s ever done.