This is where we put things that we’ve done, or that we’re working on. They might be projects for clients, or just stuff we’ve been playing with. Some of this might be stuff you can use — if you do, and you find it useful, do let us know. If you want to talk to us about anything you see here, pop us an email.
ScenicOrNot
A crowdsourcing game for finding pretty places
Our client, mySociety, wants to create a database of pretty places. They had an idea for a game that would let them crowdsource the data by rating pictures — one for each 1km grid square in the UK. The game had to be simple, fun, and pleasing to the eye. So far, over 50,000 places have been rated — but there are lots more to go! Have a play, and tell us what you think.
Jobcentre ProPlus
Searching for Jobcentre vacancies — the right way
The search pages on the Jobcentre site are a bit bad. You have to fill out four forms, and when you’re done, you can’t bookmark jobs or get RSS or email alerts. To check for new jobs, you have to go through it all again. We decided we could do better. Sam Smith wrote some scrapers, and we wrote a site that lets you search the jobs, get RSS or email alerts and provides an API. Much better.
ConsultationXML
A web-based XML editor for consultation documents
This is a tool we made for the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. It helps people make XML versions of consultation documents, which can be used to create online, interactive tools that facilitate conversation between government and people interested in shaping policy. It’s also (we think!) the first piece of government-commissioned software that’s open source.
TellThemWhatYouThink
An aggregator for central government consultations
Before TellThemWhatYouThink, people had to visit the websites of all government departments to see if a consultation they cared about was happening. This was very time consuming. TellThemWhatYouThink puts (nearly) all of them in one place, so you can search them and get email alerts when new consultations are published.
DFID Procurement
ATOM feed for the Department for International Development
We, and others, noticed that DFID’s new website didn’t have very good RSS support. This isn’t a hard thing to fix, so we knocked together a scraper to produce an ATOM feed for their procurement opportunities. This is the kind of stuff that’s really important for businesses that contract with government, so we thought it was worth doing. Do let us know if you’re finding it useful!
Civiscrape
A scraper-powered site for civil service job vacancies
We were commissioned by the Cabinet Office and the Central Office of Information to build a protoype of a central listings site for job vacancies in the civil service. Our task was to get some real-world experience of the difficulties involved, to help inform the COI’s efforts towards producing an RDFA vocabulary for jobs listings.
