Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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OpenTech 2010

· 3 comments · 1,050 words · Viewed ~278 times

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…

Elections In A Digital Age - blogging, tweeting and buzzing to the polls

· 1 comment · 650 words

Photo of a wooden sign indicating there's polling station here.

Weeks before Britons go to the polls, there's still no comprehensive list of candidates. Four citizens' initiatives have joined forces to tackle the problem. They've been gathering basic information about thousands of candidates and making the data public. "It may seem surprising but there simply is no single listing for all prospective parliamentary candidates. We want people to make an…

I Love Open Source

· 250 words

Several blobby humanoids build a cube together.

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 -…

VoteUK - Updates

· 3 comments · 400 words

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 …