From my loose understanding, India certainly faces some interesting and unique challenges. But I don’t know what they are, or how best the web can solve them. I’m sure there’s a broad section of Indian society for whom web applications are not a very practical solution to any of the challenges they face. At least for the time being. So, what are the problems experienced by Indians who are digitally included? And how can we use the web to solve them?

Should we be focusing on applications for mobile phones? Or on low-cost devices like the curiously iPad-like $35 laptop?

Should we aim to produce a quasi-public-service like FixMyStreet, or tools for accountability and transparency, like Armchair Auditor?

What sort of public data is available in India, both officially and for scraping? And how might we be able to use it to influence Indian public policy for the better?

As always, the aim for the day is to have something tangible, useful and interesting that we can show to people. Even if it’s only a screenshot or a very raw prototype.

Very grateful for your ideas, thoughts and advice!

The Dextrous Web was founded with a specific mission in mind. We want to build exemplary, smart web projects for the public sector. We think that Government can get much more out of the web than it does, and create much better websites than it has, and we want to help make that happen.

We’ve spent the last couple of years doing all sorts of things: from building simple but important websites for consultations and programmes to crowdsourcing datasets for MySociety, munging PDFs into XML to make interactive consultation tools and helping Government departments to put RDFa into their web pages.

We’re looking for a very specific person to come on board. You’re a programmer, you’ve probably been one for quite a while, and you might be the best programmer you’ve ever met. You write code all the time, because you enjoy it. You’ve probably made a website or two that do interesting things. You might have made some desktop applications, too, and you almost always finish what you start.

You display the classic and indispensable qualities of excellent programmers everywhere: laziness, impatience and hubris. You enjoy learning to use new languages, platforms and frameworks, and you’re quick about it. You have a fanatical obsession with usability, and writing beautiful, elegant applications makes you all happy on the inside – but you’re pragmatic enough to JFDI when things need to get finished. You understand that real people use computers too, and that telling the client to learn to use rsync just won’t fly.

More concretely, you’ve made stuff with Ruby on Rails, PHP and Javascript. You know RESTful architectures and the HTTP protocol. You’re an XHTML/CSS wizard, you understand why this comic is funny and if your website got Slashdotted, there’s no way it would fall over. You know your way around a terminal. You’ve used JSON, YAML, XML, ATOM, RDF and all their cousins and you understand them reasonably well.

For the right candidate, we’re offering a competitive salary, limitless coffee, a nice computer to work on and lots of interesting things to do.

If you’re this person, we’d love to meet you. First read the job description, then pop your CV over for us to see. Make sure you tell us about something you’ve made (preferably a website, and where to find it). If more than one person was involved, let us know what your bit was. If there’s anything else you want to tell us about yourself, include that too!

We’re looking forward to meeting you. The closing date for applications is July 30th 2010.

Agencies: Thanks, but no thanks. We’re only accepting direct applications.

There’s lots I didn’t like about the old site. It was never meant to last for long, but lingered for ages. It didn’t really describe us very well: we’ve been thinking about how and where we should fit into the UK’s digital landscape, but the site hasn’t been keeping pace with the ideas. We were overdue for a change.

This site isn’t finished: there’s more we want to add about us, our plans, our team and our ideas about building the kind of web supplier that Government needs and wants. But it’s better than what was here before, and hopefully introduces us a bit more clearly.

As always — if you have thoughts or ideas about the site, or us, or anything else, we’d love to hear them. Please do let us know what you think.

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.

We have more plans for it. We’ll have a section to show off some of our work, and we’ll put up more stuff explaining what we do. Time, though, is precious, and we’d rather spend it on our clients: so those things can wait for another day.

We’re going to use this blog to talk about things that we think are interesting. We might comment on new websites and services. We’ll definitely post about our own projects when something neat happens. You should expect the odd technical post, too: sometimes we solve tricky problems, and it’s good to share.

Above anything else, we’re here to solve interesting problems, so if you have one, please let us know!