Posts tagged "2009"

The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening.

The focus today is on the cause of the incident and the safety procedures. However the issue that concerns me is how public service companies like Eurostar handle communication in such emergencies. Poor communication can lead to frustration, anger and even panic. I’ve experienced this in much less drastic circumstances when commuting to and from Cardiff by train.

It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate website.

Sometimes I come away from the office and struggle to see what we have actually achieved. When you are stuck into day to day work, it is quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

When you move into a new area, how do you find out about the community you are going to be living in. How do you find out about the community groups, the local services, the bus times. Some of the more technology savvy amongst us might look towards the web in the hope that the information is available. Others might wander around and talk to neighbours, a few people just won’t care.

The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit recently?!). However yesterday they took on a new tact: they appear to have decided to bring the rest of the UK down with them.

The issue surrounds a small piece of text – the Post Code. It sits at the bottom of every address (similar to the Zip code in the USA). It is the holy grail of data in the UK. It maps each place in the country to a physical location. The Royal Mail uses it to assist with routing mail from A to B, developers use it to verify addresses and locate other services nearby. Unfortunately, access to this database costs thousands (approximately £3800 per website per year).

Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back!

There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed for 6 months (original launch date was expected to be March 2009), and going significantly over budget (costing a total of £2.8 million), you’d expect the site to be the best thing ever developed.

Last week, Neil Williams from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published his draft Government Twitter Strategy. I think its about time someone sat down and produced a document like this. Some people have responded to the document negatively (as expected), some positively, and some have completely missed the point.

I wanted to spell out why I’m pleased Neil has written this document.

There is a lot of skepticism about new media in Government. Many people are scared about it – I partly believe this is because of the lack of control. With ‘old media’ people had a pretty good idea of what they were getting into. With ‘new media’, its well, new, big, scary and uncontrollable.

Yesterday, Richard Pope and I launched WhatTheyClaimed.com, a site aimed at digitising and collating all of the data from MPs expenses.

The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, but when Richard and I realised that MPs expenses were being published, we realised we could make use of the same codebase with a few minor changes. I need to note at this point that the website was a personal project and not supported by Consumer Focus.

I’ve been a part of the team at VSI for the best part of nine years, originally as a summer job, but more recently as a full time developer. During this time I’ve seen significant changes in the way the internet works, from new technologies and new standards in design, to new ways of communicating and ways of thinking.

The internet landscape is completely different now compared to when I first started out in the industry. For the first time, we are starting to see businesses and government use the internet in completely new and innovative ways. Groups are being set up to take the vast quantity of data available and turn it into something useful. From services such as FixMyStreet.com by MySociety to the more recent School Closures website from Directgov, the internet is starting a new phase of open development.

Earlier today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin, Robin Christopherson from UK charity AbilityNet gave a talk on website accessibility. I’ve seen quite a few different talks and sessions on website accessibility and understand how important this topic is. This talk however really hit home – Robin is blind and gave the whole presentation & demonstration while using a screen reader.

I understand how screen readers work and have tried out some myself, but seeing someone use one in a real situation was really humbling. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it is to use a large part of the internet for someone who suffers from a disability that affects their ability to use a computer.

A quick update this week!

Last weekend I was pleased to launch CllrTweeps. The new site, inspired by TweetMinster, aims to list every local councillor in the UK who is on Twitter. After our first week online, we have already tracked down and verified the first 100 councillors using the service.

Unless you’ve been in a cave (or outside of the UK) for the last few days, you’ll know that we’ve been experiencing the fun of a ‘severe snow event’. The exact definition of a severe snow event remains unanswered, and I’ll leave the debate over whether what we’ve been experiencing is severe to another time. What is important, however, is that a large number of schools have been closed because of the snow. The BBC reported earlier that over 500 schools were closed today in Wales alone.