Chief among the Indian projects was some amazing mapping and visualisation work. David McCandless has done a great write-up on the Guardian Data Blog. Another fabulous project was National Election Watch, who create public data on candidates by entering the details from their affadavits. This site has one of the most awesome features I’ve ever seen on a political website: a crime-o-meter for each candidate.

But the most interesting thing which came up was the widespread use of missed calls as a way to communicate. Entire services have sprung up built on the idea that you call a number, let it ring once, and then hang up. Which is free. And then the service calls you back. The lack of any privacy regulation also allows these services to enter agreements with the telecomms companies to obtain location data on callers.

This led me to wonder: could a system be made, powered by missed calls, to report incidents of police abuse? Like an ultra-light-weight Ushahidi? So, along with a couple of the Indian devs, I put together a mock-up:

The pins need to be converted into coloured areas, but hopefully that conveys the general idea: that people who experience problems with the police — like being assaulted, or forced to pay a bribe — could anonymously report it, allowing statistics to be built up about where police abuses take place. These could then be compared to the official statistics, or to the numbers of official complaints made. And could allow people to get a real sense of the scale and geography of the problem.

Such a system could work — despite most Indians’ lack of internet access — because it’s powered by mobile phones, which almost everyone has. Even more than that, by taking advantage of missed calls, it becomes free to use and to operate, unlike SMS. And missed calls are a practical approach, because they’re already known and used by Indians in other contexts.

Unfortunately, because we only had the morning, I couldn’t do much more than that basic mock-up. But if anyone in India is reading this, and would like to take over the project, let me know! I’d love to see it up & running.

Update: I’ve just done a podcast interview about the trip with Steph Gray of Helpful Technology.

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!

Anne Steer and Claire Brooks
Potters Bar Inquest Team

There are serious problems with the way Government procures, develops and manages websites, and unless we change that, closing down websites will only be a short-term solution. People working in departments will always want new websites to do useful, valuable things, and they’ll usually find ways to make them. To call these “vanity websites” isn’t really fair. And pushing all citizen-facing content onto Directgov, NHS Choices or BusinessLink isn’t really sensible. Such large platforms bring a necessary degree of inflexibility which isn’t helpful to people who are trying to innovate.

I think that, as with many of the difficulties facing Government, IT and the Web, the problems begin with procurement. Government’s traditional suppliers just aren’t very good at making websites. Government needs to make sure that the new breed of suppliers can get their collective feet in the door. We need procurement processes that make it practical for SMEs to bid for work, civil servants who are keen to try a new approach and project management that takes account of the fact that a lot of “best practice” just isn’t, anymore.

But I think the most important thing to bear in mind today is that this response from the Coalition is a reaction to the problems of the past. Lots of Government sites are genuinely bad, and totally useless. And some of them date back to an era where that’s more or less all we could expect: because the ideas, the theory, the business processes and technology weren’t there. Expensive websites were the only websites there were. Bad was the best we could do. It’s a bit like comparing an AMC Gremlin to a modern car and expecting it to stack up.

But that’s emphatically not the case anymore. Technology and software development processes have improved substantially over the last decade. It really is possible to produce exemplary websites at a fraction of the cost that would have been unavoidable 6 or 7 years ago. NGOs and the private sector have seized on these technologies and ideas to unleash a new wave of products and services that have transformed the way we communicate and think about what the web can do. All the Government has to do is start commissioning it.

I hope that that’s what we’ll see happening over the next couple of years — and I especially hope that the problems of the past decade won’t blind us to the extraordinary opportunities of the next.

With thanks to Rory Cellan-Jones for the title!

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.

RailsAPI‘s sdoc format is very nice in that it allows searching over all methods and classes, and is generally an intuitive way of doing things.

WordPress is full of PHPDoc comments, the Codex is invaluable, and of course being able to read the source is absolutely necessary much of the time. All in all, WordPress is quite well documented, though there’s really no coherent place that brings that all together. So I am very happy to have this new tool available before my next WordPress jaunt: WordPress Docs.

Peter Simmonds
Digital Project Manager
Department of Health

We took a look at it, and decided to make a gem that uses a local database (usually a bit faster than using a Web-based API), but which is similarly easy to use.

Three hours later, we present to you posty!

The data it provides from CodePoint Open is:

• postcode
• quality
• latitude
• longitude
• country
• nhs_region
• nhs_health_authority
• county
• district
• ward

In all these cases, rather than proving the name of the county/district/ward/etc, it only provides the identifier used in the data set. This is a case where UK Postcodes would be a better option.

To install it,

sudo gem install posty

To set up the database (which can be downloaded automatically from mySociety, or you can download the latest version yourself and use the -c option),

sudo posty-init -g

This should take about 8 minutes to load all the CSV into the database.

To use it,

require 'posty'
Posty.postcode('SE1 1EN')

If you’re going to be using it frequently from the same process, you should probably use the following instead,

require 'posty'
posty = Posty.new
postcode = posty.postcode('SE1 1EN')
postcode = posty.postcode('SE1 7PB')

The magick going on here is that the database is stored in the gem (in lib/posty/codepointopen.sqlite3), and then it’s available without having to connect manually.

Have a fiddle with posty and tell us what you think.

Consultation team
Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

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.