Blog
NHS Choices have a new hospital rating tool 11th Aug 09
Just discovered (via Twitter) that NHS Choices have released a new tool for users to rate hospitals. Fantastic. Government should embrace user generated content more often than it does, and feedback on Hospitals is a great application for it — but their implementation could do with a bit of tweaking.
First: the tool has been implemented as a new feature within the existing NHS choices website. Its design is clean, but very text heavy. This is not helped by the use of very long titles in the sidebar boxes that contain statistics — including the user-generated stuff — about the hospital you’re viewing. I suspect that they are this long because of a desire to make it ultra-clear which content is drawn from official statistics, and which is user-generated.
That’s a reasonable concern, but the site as it stands smacks of paranoia. I think that most people can tell which bits are official and which aren’t, even if the bits are in the same box. The distinction between “75% of people would recommend this hospital to a friend” and “1.33 MRSA infections for ever 10,000 bed stays” is obvious. There’s also a very strange chart in the user-generated sidebar: it appears in the middle of a sentence. I’d call myself a fairly seasoned web user, but even I found that confusing. It just looks broken.
Second: the comments aren’t prominent enough. They’re too far down the page, and relegated to a sidebar. They’re one of the most useful parts of the page — personal stories will always speak louder than dry statistics — so I’d give them a bit more importance, and put them in the main content area, beneath the hospital’s description. As well as being more prominent, it’s more consistent with how comments are usually presented.
If you click through to read all the comments, you find that they are presented in exactly this way on the next page, which is excellent: it displays all the comments in a way that makes it easy to absorb the ratings at a glance, summarises them right at the top of the page and has a prominent call to action for people who want to post feedback. Even more important than that, it has replies from the hospitals, which is fantastic. Government forays into the social web rarely ever result in real two-way communication. To see it being done is encouraging.
In short — despite being a bit rough around the edges — this is a nice bit of work, and definitely a big step in the right direction.
We're Hiring! 4th Jun 09
The Dextrous Web is a young start-up, making its first hire. We’re looking for a PHP/Ruby developer to join the team – which is currently one full-timer and a collection of freelance designers and programmers.
The Dextrous Web was founded with a specific mission in mind. We want to make useful things on the web that solve interesting and difficult problems. We think that agile, social, programmable websites are the best thing since sliced bread, and we’re constantly amazed at the things the web makes possible.
Most of our clients are in the public sector, and that’s where our hearts lie: we want to show the Government how it ought to be doing things on the web! There’s so much that could be done, and the possibilities are exciting.
We think this is a great job for the right person. If that might be you, please do read some more and consider applying.
ScenicOrNot’s Secret Project… 1st Jun 09
Isn’t secret anymore!
MySociety have just taken the wraps off Mapumental, which is a terribly clever mapping application to help you figure out where you want to live if you have a commute (and probable more besides that). We and MySociety teamed up to build ScenicOrNot, which has produced the dataset that Mapumental consults when you move the scenicness slider.
They’ve produced a video to show the site, currently in private beta, in action:
Mapumental is really quite impressive — a significant technical accomplishment as well as very useful — so significant kudos are due to mySociety. Nicely done!
Andrew Stott — the new Director of Digital Engagement 13th May 09
I was slightly bemused when the Cabinet Office announced that it was going to create a new £160k position for the Director of Digital Engagement.
The job seemed like a tall order: a list of requirements that it would be hard for any one person to fulfill, and a very big job to do with very limited resources. It seemed like a strange move to make when creating two positions at £80k a piece would probably still attract very qualified people, and give you more time and knowledge for your money.
Nonetheless, I watched with interest, and now, a tad later than expected, the position has been filled by Andrew Stott. My initial reaction was along the same lines as Emma Mulqueeny’s — more bemusement — but actually, I think Andrew is a good choice. Not who I’d have expected, but good nonetheless. As numerous people have said, he is very qualified, does have a brain the size of a planet, and has lots of experience pushing through the kind of change that we need. More than that, though, he’s practical.
I worked with Andrew briefly in 2008. One of the things we were looking at at the time was the quasi-XML version of the Civil Service Yearbook, which has lots of useful data in it. As is usually the case, though, it wasn’t proper XML — it’s variously broken, inconsistent and badly written. We spent a satisfying ten minutes at the end of the day bemoaning such irritations, and the next morning Andrew showed up at the office having spent all the previous evening writing a bunch of code to take the nasty XML and make it into useful data.
That, I think, is indicative of the man.
ScenicOrNot’s on BBC News 27th Apr 09
Just a quickie post — ScenicOrNot, a project we recently completed for MySociety, has been featured in BBC News Online’s Technology section.
Predictably, there’s been a big jump in player numbers. We just zoomed past 3000 players, 260,000 votes and over 50,000 places rated. Thanks Auntie!
Reforming Ordnance Survey 25th Apr 09
People have been talking about the Ordnance Survey rather a lot recently.
It’s a very strange beast. It has mountains of really useful data: electoral boundaries, postcode databases and the locations of all sorts of buildings, not to mention roads, railways and green spaces. Unfortunately, it’s a quasi-independent body, which has to pay its own way. It charges heaps of money for access to all these datasets, and makes them available under strange and deeply inappropriate licences.
This has long been a problem for civic hackers, and by implication, everyone else: if you want to make a service that needs to turn a postcode into a geographic location, you need to use their data, and most of the time, you can’t. It costs an arm and a leg.
Fortunately, it’s clear to everyone that the OS needs to be significantly reformed. They own datasets like electoral boundaries, that are fundamental to the operation of a democracy. They’ll charge you if you want to use them, even if you’re the government and you’re organising an election. That’s just nuts, and we all know it. So what to do?
Thankfully, people have been working on it. The recent Power of Information Taskforce report had lots of good things to say: Recommendation 7 was almost perfect. Liberate postcodes and boundary data. Make basic mapping data available for free to all, for modest use. Simplify licensing. Its only real downside was the absence of any mention of derived data.
Put simply, if you use an OS map to create a database of something — like postboxes, hospitals or parks — then OS share copyright in that data. In this modern age of user generated content, that position is completely unsupportable. It’s a shameless grab for intellectual property, motivated by their desire to receive extra royalties. For a private company, that might be fair enough, but it’s reprehensible for a body that exists to provide a public service.
For anyone who thinks this is merely a theoretical problem, it may be of interest that all those lovely crime maps launched by police forces across the UK are probably in violation of the OS’s licensing terms.
This, then, was the background to the latest budget. Having heard that it would contain some new announcements, we were waiting for its publication with baited breath, and indeed: it promised reform. The following day, Ordance Survey published their new commercial strategy. It is underwhelming.
There are some good changes: more data, including boundary information, will be made available through OpenSpace, their API. They’re going to revise their definition of “commercial” so that sites that use their data can carry advertising without being required to pay for licences. But that, more or less, is it. The rest of the strategy revolves around converting people using free licences into ones that become financially sustainable so they can pay. Fair enough, but hardly groundbreaking.
The real problems remain. OS still own electoral boundary data and postcode boundaries & locations. They still decide if you’re commercial, and you still have to accept their onerous licences to use their data. OS still maintain a stranglehold on any data that they consider to be derived from theirs. They’ll still charge you royalties to use that data, of at least £1000 a year. You still won’t be able to do anything with that data that’s not acceptable under their licence, like adding it to OpenStreetMap.
This new strategy is progress, but only just. It is at best a fractional improvement upon what we had before.
A lot more needs to be done.
ScenicOrNot: finding Great Britain’s pretty places 16th Apr 09
Last week, we finished a new project. MySociety commissioned us to produce ScenicOrNot. They want to create a “database of scenicness”: something that identifies pretty places and their locations. They came to us with the idea for the site, and we put it together for them over a couple of weeks.
The idea behind ScenicOrNot is simple: it’s a game, very much akin to HotOrNot, which asks users to give photographs of places a score out of 10. There’s a photo on the site for nearly every 1km grid square of the UK, so eventually, we’ll have a dataset that we can use to give every bit of Great Britain an average score for prettiness. MySociety have a very cool plan for it, and they’ll release the data as soon as it’s useful so that other people can get cracking with their cool ideas, too.
The site is fun, easy and hopefully a little bit addictive: just the right prerequisites for a site that’s croudsourcing a new dataset. If we’ve done it right, rating pictures shouldn’t feel remotely like hard work, and by the progress we’ve seen so far — 109,000 votes cast and 10% of the country rated in just under a week — it’s not going too badly.
Please do check out the site and, as always, tell us what you think about it.
JobcentreProPlus, tricky geocoding and unreliable datasets 26th Mar 09
One of the problems with working with large datasets — especially when you’re scraping them — is that they don’t always work the way one might think.
We’ve recently had reports that JobcentreProPlus.com turns up jobs that aren’t close to the postcode that the user entered when they started their search. We’ve done a bit of digging, and turned up two problems. Unfortunately, neither is easily fixable.
The first problem is that JobcentrePro’s website doesn’t expose very good location data. It’s often as little as “Camden Town, London” or “Sevenoaks, Kent”. For this to be useful, we need to convert it to a latitude and longitude, so we can see if it’s near the postcode you enter when you start a search.
This process is called geocoding, and it’s an inherently error-prone process. There’s often no way to tell the the difference between places with similar names. Usually, it works well enough, but sometimes, it’ll generate a result that’s unexpected: in real terms, you see a search result for a job in Glasgow when you were searching for things in London.
There’s not a lot we can do about this. If JobcentrePlus included better geographical information in their listings — like a postcode, or a latitude/longitude — we wouldn’t have to geocode things, which would be a great improvement.
Unfortunately, in this case, it gets more complicated. The second problem is that the JobcentrePlus database (which also drives their service!) doesn’t store good location data. Sometimes the location refers to the address of the Jobcentre shop. Sometimes, it’s the agency advertising the job. Sometimes, it’s the employer’s head office, but not the actual building you’d be working in if you took the job.
In summary: the way we’re forced to gather data introduces errors, and the underlying dataset has quite a few errors to begin with.
Despite this, we still think JobcentreProPlus.com is useful. Most of the time, the job will in fact be near the jobcentre, the employer’s head office or the job agency. That’s why our “distance from postcode” field defaults to 10 miles — we’re confident that that’ll be right, most of the time.
The bottom line is that the quality of our site is completely dependent on the quality of the underlying data. Until that data is better, there’s not much we can do to improve things — but we’re not too worried. From a plain reading of search results, we think we’re doing ok. This search for stuff in London returns mostly stuff that, according to the job ad, is in London.
We think it’s good enough to be useful, and that’s really our only goal.
The Office of National Statistics and Postcodes 12th Mar 09
Here’s a story from FreeOurData which is, quite frankly, incredible. The Office of National Statistics, in preparing for the next census, has found that the postcode databases offered by the Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey aren’t accurate enough for their purposes. Their solution: to build their own database. This is fair. The postcode database is not amazingly accurate, and ONS have different requirements anyway.
Unfortunately, Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey make good money from selling the postcode databases to other organisations. These datasets are very valuable: you’ve probably made use of them whenever you’ve put your postcode into a website. Royal Mail and Ordnance survey did not — apparently — like the idea of ONS making another postcode database with which they’d presumably have to compete. So, rather than take that nice dataset and do useful things with it — like giving it back to us taxpayers — the ONS have pledged to build the database, use it for the census, and then destroy it.
Postcode databases are almost a holy grail. Of all the datasets in the country, liberating the postcode database for free reuse would probably create more value than any other. The thought of spending £12m on a new, super-accurate postcode database and then destroying it is wasteful, a huge missed opportunity and to be frank, completely idiotic.
We implore you: don’t do it.
Rewired State: JobcentreProPlus 8th Mar 09
On Saturday I was at RewiredState. A bunch of geeks got together to build things. We wanted to show government how it’s done!
At the end of the day, we each got two minutes to present what we’d done to each other, and an assemblage of government types. People did some really cool stuff, from Rob McKinnon & co’s Compani.es, which is the website that Companies House ought to have, to a reimplementation of ActivePlaces. They scraped this multimillion pound website, got all their data, and then did with it in an afternoon what the site hasn’t managed to do with a massive budget and years of time. Great stuff. Emma Mulqueeny’s written some more about the day, and the other hacks.
Sam Smith and I got together to do a project. Given the current economic malaise, it’s quite important for people to be able to find jobs, and a little birdy turned us on to the fact that the JobCentre Plus site really isn’t good. In fact, it’s quite painful. To get any jobs out of it at all, you have to fill in 4 reasonably large forms. Once you have some jobs to look at, you can’t do anything with them. There’s no RSS, you can’t get email alerts for new jobs, and you can’t bookmark jobs you’re interested in, because their URLs don’t work properly. The next time you want to find jobs, you have to go through the whole ordeal again. Bleh.
Our task was to make this better. Sam wrote some scrapers to pull down Jobcentre’s data — which was no mean feat in itself — and I made a website to display it. It’s a bit rough and ready, but it works. You can go to www.jobcentreproplus.com, search for jobs in your area, view them, bookmark them, get email alerts, subscribe in your feed reader and use the API to search and display jobs on your own site. Everything that the real site should do and doesn’t.
We didn’t realise it at the time, but there were prizes for the hacks that the organisers liked the most. Rather suprisingly — given the very high quality of all the other projects — Sam and I won!
We’re really glad that they liked it, and we hope you will too. Have a look, and let us know what you think.