A quick report on OpenTech 2010 - the London event for geeks interested in Government data, openness and generally doing good things with tech and data. Copyright Matt Jones used under a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence. I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk about the trials and tribulations of using open - and not so open - data. Instead, I gave a more…
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As I mentioned in my last post about VoteUK, I found the TheyWorkForYou API to be a little lacking when it came to image sizing. I posted a request asking if there was a pattern to the image sizes and, if not, was it possible to have the sizes returned in the API. The "standard" open source reply - "fix it yerself" - was predictably swift. So I did. The source code is remarkably accessible - although a few more comments wouldn't go amiss. This was my first experience with GIT and Github. I…
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After the tragic death of Ernest Marples, I'm sorry to say that the site fell in to a bit of disrepair. With no postcode data and no new boundary data, it looked like VoteUK was going to be permanantly out of business. Thanks - once again - to the clever-clogs at TheyWorkForYou, at least half of the problem has been solved. The API call getConstituency now has a future parameter. Adding future=1 to the call will return the constituency the Postcode will be in for the 2010 General Election. …
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VoteUK is no more. In order to precisely show you where your electoral registration office was, I needed to take its postcode and covert it to latitude and longitude. That's the service Ernest Marples provided. A few days ago, the Post Office - in their infinite wisdom - set their legal dogs on those running Ernest Marples. The Post Office charges for the file that they generated which converts post codes to location. It can cost anywhere from £1,000 to £4,000 per year to get accurate data…
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One of the problems with creating a service which deals with elections, is that boundaries change. One year you might be in the Electoral Constituency of Woking, the next year it might be Guildford. Boundaries have to shift in order to keep each MP with roughly the same number of constituents. The work to determine how these boundaries should be formed is done by The Boundary Commission. They have produced a report to show how the boundaries will be set out at the next General Election. The…
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As you may recall from previous instalments of my thrilling blog, I'm trying to find the location of every polling station in the UK. This is proving to be rather tricky - if not impossible. The data aren't centrally held and, in any case, polling stations aren't announced until an election is called. So I went for the next best thing. Using the wonderful What Do They Know site to make a Freedom of Information Act request, I asked the Electoral Commission for details of every council and wh…
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An inspiring day. There were, I think, two main points of contention. 1) Information wants to be free - but personal information wants to be private. 2) Raw Data Now. Should we wait for standards - or just make them up as we go along? As for (1) I'm happy for everyone to see my data if I can see theirs. Might reduce hypocrisy. I'm aware that I'm in the minority here. There are a lot of sociological and usability issues as well. For (2) I'm in the minority in that I think JFDI is a very …
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As part of my project to create a mobile polling station locator site, I've been playing with various mapping APIs. As a base experiment, I passed the postcode of a polling station (GU22 7DT) to both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. Here are the results. - Two things of interest to note. Firstly, Google has a specific "Mobile" call in the API, it reformats the map image to be more readable on the mobile - I think you'll agree that Google edges out Yahoo here. Secondly, Google maps is less…
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It has always depressed me how little the British make of elections. We don't have voter registration drive, "Kiss me; I've voted" badges" or much in the way of celebrating our democracy. Perhaps it's our reserved nature. But I think it has a direct effect on the declining number of people voting. We're going to have a General Election within a year - how do we encourage people to register and then vote? I want to create a dual-aim mobile site. How do I register to vote? Enter…
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