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 general talk about how to harness the power of the mobile web to empower people - and why iPhone apps are the wrong way to get data to the masses.

More details in a moment. First off, my thoughts on the rest of the presentations.

Mozilla Drumbeat

The new projects coming out of Mozilla Drumbeat look great - I'm particularly enamoured with Universal Subtitles. For too long, web video has been inaccessible to those with hearing difficulties - or who do not understand the language spoken.

Visionon.tv

A rather ramshackle presentation from VisionOn.tv. I fail to see what they're doing different than Miro in terms of getting activist video out to the masses. Their ideas of training Citizen Journalists seems to be a good one - but they failed to articulate what exactly their credentials were.

Openly Local

Chris Taggart gave an inspiring talk about Openly Local. His efforts in scraping inaccessible data and setting them free are truly heroic. The work he did to open up to obstinate Charities Commission should be the stuff of geek legend.

LinkedGov: Filling in the Gaps

Hadley Beeman took us through the intricacies of tying up hundreds of disparate data sets. Not a naturally exciting topic, but one which went to the very heart of the issue of open data. Thousands of separate databases, all containing indecipherable acronyms, frustrate even the hardiest geek.

Open Data in Clinical Trials

Ben Goldacre retains his title as most impassioned speaker. Working with Louise Crow, they are in the process of opening up clinical trial data. With this, they hope to be able to see which drug companies are withholding trial information from the public.

Rewiring the State

The speakers from Young Rewired State were the stars of the day. Seeing the dedication and enthusiasm of people - not yet school-leavers - as they hack away at open data was hugely uplifting. A full list of the projects is available.

The most impressive was Issy Long's site to display Government energy usage "GovSpark". I'm sure this young woman will go far.

Data.gov.uk

The data.gov.uk folks were out in strength. They announced data.gov.uk at OpenTech 2009. This presentation was a summary of where they have got to and where is left to go.

I demo'd VoteUK to Thayer Prime and won a swish t-shirt! Hurrah!

Wild Ducks - An Open Source Symbian Phone

Sebastian Brannstrom from Symbian took to the stage to talk about marrying Open Hardware with the newly opened Symbian Source Code. The (unfinished) result is Wild Ducks - a completely* open phone. Open hardware and open software.

If you are interested in helping, the group meets every Sunday to eat pizza and hack.

*The radio driver, has to be closed source for various legal and regulatory reasons.

Why Doesn't Your Site Work On My Mobile Phone

My presentation. Slides and further discussion are available. Unfair of me to comment - so I'll let twitter do the twalking.

Graham Bleach

@gdb_

Great talk from @edent at #opentech about not neglecting older phones when developing for mobile web.

---

Dan Benton

@dogsbodyorg

If to are developing for mobile then I encourage you to look up @edent . Some great real stats and real world advice #opentech

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People Power in Your Pocket

Craig Heath lead an informative session around security and personal privacy. I'd advise anyone interested in mobile to take a look at Symbian's Security Roadmap and Strategy. This talk would have been more suited to the Over The Air conference - but for mobile wonks like me, was very interesting.

FrontlineSMS

This is exactly the sort of empowering technology I love hearing about. The FrontlineSMS project aims to be "Outlook for SMS". Using a cheap laptop, a GSM dongle and free software - anyone can become a campaigner. It's used for coordinating disaster relief, informing farmers about diseases in their area, telling trader the best prices. Its software has been expanded to work for medical, legal, business and political campaigns. Open Source - so hack away!

Apps for Good

I really admire the theory behind Apps for Good - teach disenfranchised young people how to make apps. However, I think their approach is 100% wrong. They'd clearly done no market research - they were trying to create Android apps when their target demographic are BlackBerry users (as they admitted). Some of the projects they showed off would have been much more successful and useful as mobile websites. For example, the Stop and Search app is only available on expensive Android handsets. I'm not saying they shouldn't have created the app - just that they should have created it as an enhancement for a mobile website.

That said, I'm filled with hope when I see what they are doing. Getting young people into programming, designing, creating is vital to raising their awareness of the opportunities out there.

Overall

A fantastic day - huge thanks to Sam Smith and all the organisers. It's really inspired me to get cracking on some of the open data ideas I've had bubbling away. Every Council Chief, Mayor and Senior Civil Servant should attend OpenTech 2011 and understand why we need Open Data and what magical things we will create using it.

Huge thanks to the Government for sponsoring the event and finally creating an open data platform. Data.gov.uk shows how to do a successful IT project which comes in quickly and cheaply. And is genuinely useful. Kudos.

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.  It was easy to get the code and, luckily, I didn't have to dive too far in to its syntax.

I had initially thought about using the EXIF data within the images to get the width and height.  Unfortunately, not every image can be guaranteed to have (accurate) EXIF data.  PHP to the rescue once again with the getimagesize() function.

So, where we previously had

if ($image) $row['image'] = $image;

This becomes

if ($image) {
    list($width, $height) = getimagesize($image);
    $row['image'] = $image;
    $row['image_height'] = $height;
    $row['image_width'] = $width;
}

Many thanks to Matthew Somerville for testing and releasing the patch in double quick time. You can examine the changes made to the code.

So now the API returns,

/images/mps/10409.jpg
59
49

Brilliant!

So, I have a problem, I can see how much effort it will be to fix, I suggest a solution, it works and goes into production.  That's the awesome power of open source.

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.

I've also made use of TWFY's getMP API call.  It returns enough detail about the current MP to be useful - including a photo.

So, a valid postcode will get you something like this:

MP Photo

One thing to note about the photos. Each one is a different size. This gives us two small problems.

Firstly there is no guarantee of how small the photo is. Should one MP's photo be massive, that could cause a problem for the phone trying to download it. All the ones I've tried so far have been thumbnail size.

Secondly, because we don't know the height and width of the image, we can't put the height and width attributes in the <img> tag.  Not only is this poor HTML, but it will mean that rendering the page will take longer and - depending on the phone - page reflow may occur.

To mitigate this issue, I'm using http://tinysrc.mobi/ - it will automatically shrink the picture to fit the phone.  This doesn't help with the page reflow issue though.

As for geo-locating Postcodes - I suggest you respond to Ordnance Survey's consultation and / or lobby your MP.

Until there's an official source for postcode data, I've gone back to using Yahoo!'s geo-location API.  I then pass these co-ordinates on to the Google Maps API.

So, VoteUK lives on.  Next steps are to make sure that all the data I got from the Electoral Commission is valid and build a framework for volunteers to enter their local candidate details.

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.  That's a price that I can't afford - neither can many non-profits, startups or innovators.

"I take the position that the postcode file and the data set of physical coordinates that go with it are a national asset that should be freely available to any UK citizen"  - Tom Watson MP

The Guardian has shown that there is more economic benefit to the UK by setting this data free.

So, what can be done about it?

• Sign the petition to the Prime Minister
• Write a blog post, send a tweet, and tell your friends what’s happening!
• Call, email or fax your MP

The Royal Mail is in its death-throes. It is vital that data created and supported by public money is returned to the public before it is sold off to the highest bidder... only to be sold back to us.

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.  There report - while detailed, thorough and no doubt accurate - is utterly useless.  Well, from a "linked data" perspective.  It's a 57 MB PDF if you want to see for your self.

I was expecting, along with the rationales, maps and population densities to see something like

Constituency: Woking

Ward: Mount Herman East

Postcodes: GU22 0XX, GU22 0XY, GU22 0XZ ...

Or, indeed, anything which would allow one to easily link the data to other sources.  This is what the report contains.

A Detailed Map of Surrey

While the map is pretty detailed, it doesn't contain any geo-spatial co-ordinates.  It looks like it has just been drawn by hand in ink.  There is no way to extract any information out of this map.

The also produce a list of constituencies and wards.

This is not text - it's a screen shot!

There are three problems with this.

1. It's a screen shot.  I don't mean that I've taken a screen shot, I mean that they have taken a screenshot of the text and pasted it into the report.  There is no way to copy the text out of there.
2. Even if it were possible, they don't list the Government standard codes for the wards
3. There are no postcodes or other forms of information which tie the ward to a specific place.

Gah!

So, how can I find this information?  I know! I'll write to those nice folk at Parliament

Dear Sir or Madam,

I notice that you provide a website which allows Constituency lookup from a postcode (http://findyourmp.parliament.uk/)

Do you have the data for the *new* Constituencies proposed by the Boundary Commission?

The Boundary Commission has maps of the new areas (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pbc/default.asp) but these don't have postcodes on them.

I'm happy to make an FoI request if that is your preferred way of releasing the information.

If you do not have the information - would you be able to tell me who does?

Many thanks

A few days later I got back this.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your enquiry asking if we have the post codes for the new Constituencies proposed by the Boundary Commission.

I am afraid, the House of Commons Information Office is unable to give you a list of the post codes for the proposed "new" constituencies Boundaries. The House purchases a list of postcodes for each Parliamentary constituencies from the Office of National Statistics and the new list will not be purchased until nearer the time of the General Election when the changes in Parliamentary constituencies take effect.

You may like to contact the Office of National Statistic to see if you can purchase a list from them of the new constituencies.

Customer Contact Centre

Office for National Statistics

Room 1.015

Government Buildings

Cardiff Road

Newport

South Wales

NP10 8XG

Telephone - +44 (0) 845 601 3034

I hope this is helpful

So, off to the ONS! I took a look through their website, couldn't find what I wanted, so I emailed them.

I'm looking for some definitive data on the electoral constituencies and their comprising wards for the next general election.  That is, those incorporating the boundary changes in the Boundary Commission's Fifth periodical report.

Under "Names and codes for Electoral Geography" your document "Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies" only lists the 647 constituencies from the 2005 election.  Do you have the data for the upcoming election?

Similarly, in "Names and codes for Administrative Geography" I'm not sure if the document "Wards (Eng) Dec 2008 Names and Codes" contains the latest wards.  There also seems to be no schema to link Wards to Constituencies that I can see.

Do you hold such information?

Which sadly got back

Dear Terence,

Thank you for your recent enquiry

Please be advised that this information is currently not available. This is because current wards are split across the new boundaries and a review of these is about to be carried out which makes them subject to change.

If you have any further questions, please let me know.

So, no luck there.

Is this really so hard? All I want is to know that Postcode X is in Ward Y of Constituency Z.  It would appear that this information just isn't held anywhere. The review has been completed by the Boundary Commission but they either don't consider linked data or they don't share it. I just wish they would Set Our Data Free.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely?

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 which postcodes they cover for elections.

I'm delighted to say that, after a friendly chat with the very helpful Iredia Oboh I now have the data I need!

Check out the nearly finished VOTEUK.

I have a table listing every one of the 17 million postcodes in the UK.  Each postcode has a "Council ID".

I have a table listing every Council with their contact details and their "Council ID".

Using the joy that is MySQL I can take a postcode and find the details of the Council who administer elections in that area.

$query = "SELECT Council_ID from postcode_councilID WHERE postcode = '". $postcode . "'";
$result=mysql_query($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$council_id = $row["Council_ID"];
$info_query = "SELECT * FROM councils WHERE Council_ID = " . $council_id;
$info_result=mysql_query($info_query);
$info_row = mysql_fetch_array($info_result);

So, I can take W1A 1AA and find that it's administered by Westminster Council, their email address, phone number and postcode.

The data can be found on the FoI request. Note that the CSV files are in UTF-16. You may wish to convert them to UTF-8 or ASCII depending on what you will be doing with the data.

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 bad idea. I want clear and stable standards. I don't want to fuss around with RSS on one site, JSON on the next and Serialised PHP on another - all with wildly different ontologies. For Government data - there should be central and enforced standards. I will take time and be painful - but it will save us effort and pain in the long run.

A particular highlight for me was meeting Paul Hiscoe of Transparency Data. They are the people behind Scores on the Doors (SOTD). SOTD collate publicly accessible data on food hygiene inspections by local councils. They then make those data easily available in a single place. They also, for a cost, provide an API for restaurant review sites and the like.

That's it. That's all they do. They do it simply and well. They don't need to build a community, monetize, find a freemium proposition, charge end users, advertise, have a discussion board etc. They provide a simple and effective service. That's something certain people attending found to be too difficult a concept.

Not everything needs to be monetized. Especially when we, the taxpayers, have already paid. We pay for the information to be collected, collated and made available. There is no need to charge us again! Not every service is a business.

I also presented a talk about filming the police.

Qik only uploaded the first half - I'll try and get the rest working later.

A Few Bad Points

In truth this was a great BarCamp and produced some of the most stimulating conversations. The minor quibbles I have are mostly logistical. I only mention them because Sylwia specifically asked to hear what they could do better next time. They also serve as a gentle reminder for anyone else planning a BarCamp.

Oxford on a Sunday isn't the most accessible place. But it did make a nice change from London.

Gaps between session. There were none. It would have been good to have a five minute breather to let people go to the loo / stretch their legs / etc.

Lack of presenters. The three main rooms seemed well booked, but there were a lot of tourists. While I'm sure all had presented at a BarCamp before, a bit of encouragement could have given to get people presenting.

Crèche. I think it's great that people feel they can bring their kids to events like this. But they need to be given something to do. Having a screaming child run through your presentation is, at best, merely annoying. A few colouring-in books (or whatever kids have these days) might have calmed things down.

Vegetarian food. There was none. Well, to be fair, there was potato salad, cous-cous and crisps. I'm aware that I'm at fault for not stating in advance that I had particular dietary needs - but a few cheese sandwiches wouldn't have been too hard to conjure up!

Overall, minor quibbles on an otherwise excellent and informative day.

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 accurate than Yahoo! Maps. Severely so. While maps.google.com is highly accurate when passed a postcode, the API seems only to look at the first part and discard the rest. Yahoo on the other hand is unnervingly precise.

What to do? Well, as all the cool kids are doing, let's have ourselves a mashup!

We can call Yahoo Maps to get the Latitude and Longitude of a postcode thusly http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=YD-9G7bey8_JXxQP6rxl.fBFGgCdNjoDMACQA--&zip=gu227dt&state=uk This will return <Latitude>51.318691</Latitude> <Longitude>-0.543540</Longitude> <Address/> <City>Woking, GU22 7DT</City> <State>United Kingdom</State> <Country>GB</Country> We take the Latitude and Longitude and pass it to Google Maps like so http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=$lat,$long&markers=$lat,$long,tiny&zoom=14&size=240x240&maptype=mobile&key=&sensor=false Which nets us this map.

Google Map from Yahoo Geo Location

Hey presto! Better looking than the Yahoo Map and better accuracy than the Google Map.

The geocoding prescision of the Google Maps API is very poor for UK postcodes. There really shouldn't need to be this need sort of work around.

This is the sort of data that the UK government should be providing. The Ordnance Survey have an API but it seems restricted to JavaScript which isn't very useful for most mobile phones. Nevertheless I'll have a play with it and see if it's more useful.

Edit

I am now using Ernest Marples' Postcode Latitude/Longitude Lookup API which has much greater accuracy than either Google or Yahoo.

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 home postcode (or use geolocation), get back phone number for registration.
• Where do I vote?
  • Enter home postcode (or use geolocation), get back an address and a map of your local polling station.

Simple, right?

(Why mobile? Well, partly because I'm a mobile guy and partly because more people have access to a phone than a PC. You can use the phone to call voter registration direct from the web page. You can also take the mobile map with you to help find the polling station.)

The Problems

Getting the Data

The UK has a patchwork of different authorities responsible for various aspects of our lives. Because of this, there's a surprising lack of centrally held information. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Electoral Commission. They simply don't track where all the UK's polling stations are.

So, to get a list of polling stations I'd need to contact every returning officer in the UK. With nearly 700 MPs, that could be tricky - but not impossible.

Where to vote.

Calculating the distance between two postcodes is not simple, but can be done. The problem is, your nearest station may not be where you are registered to vote. Can you vote at a different station? Does a user get shown a list of local polling stations? If not, can returning officers supply data (in a suitable format) showing which postcodes vote at which stations?

Virality.

I am not politically neutral - but the site must be. What good, neutral content can attract repeat visitors? What will encourage people to text the address to their friends?

I was impressed with the work Hope Not Hate did - can that be built on? The deadline for registering to vote is always 11 days before an election. Can the site be built sufficiently before the election? How to encourage voters to come back on polling day? I want a UK version of this to send to my friends

So, that's the idea and the problems - any thoughts?