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.

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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.

"It may seem surprising but there simply is no single listing for all prospective parliamentary candidates. We want people to make an informed choice and that's difficult because so many new people are standing this time - and a record number of incumbent MPs are standing down because of expense scandal," said Edmund von der Burg from YourNextMP.

One recent poll (PollLab 10/3/10) found nearly half of voters cannot name their MP and three quarters have no idea who their candidates are.

The message from four independent groups which collect and display candidate data online (YourNextMP, hustings.com, iElect UK & ivote2010) is a simple one – don't leave the decision about who to vote for until polling day – check out the candidates first and make them work for your vote.

In recent weeks, the British media has touted this election as the "first truly digital election." Online tools such as myconservatives.com and its Labour counterpart membersnet are being used in local campaigns to recruit volunteers and collect donations. But, Frances Harrison from iElect UK argues that the Internet's greatest impact is in empowering the ordinary citizen and allowing undecided voters to learn more about candidates.

"The much-touted digital election campaign is not just about new communication channels for the big parties – it's just as much about empowering ordinary citizens and giving them a voice to disseminate information," said Harrison.

YourNextMP, which is affiliated to DemocracyClub, allows any member of the public to upload candidate names, photos and details online. Hustings  compares candidates in much more detail in the key marginal seats. While iElect UK is an iPhone app with candidate data and iVote2010 is aimed at any mobile phone with a web browser.

WHO WE ARE IN DETAIL

YourNextMP is a comprehensive list of candidates for the general election which is made freely available as a website and as data downloads for others to build on. The details are editable in a wiki-like manner and many of the contributions are from members of the public. By ensuring that their details are on YourNextMP candidates can be sure that they will appear on all the services built on the data that it shares.

Contact: Edmund von der Burg Site: http://www.yournextmp.com/

iElect UK is a new, free iPhone app that helps you know who to vote for. It allows users to find their constituency, using GPS or postcode, and then view a list of candidates as well as the MP. The user can ask to be contacted by any of the politicians. The idea being to promote a conversation between the electorate and their representatives. It's been developed by two London women: an ex BBC journalist & promotional marketing manager.

Contact: Frances Harrison or Nerissa Martin Site: www.crowdspeak.co.uk

Hustings gives links to sites being used by candidates for their online campaigning, e.g. twitter, facebook, youtube, flikr, winkball etc. It also collates news on candidates and offers candidates the option to upload their own data such as podcasts, photos and videos.

Contact: James Evans Site: www.hustings.com

iVote2010 is a mobile site that allows any phone with a web browser to find their prospective parliamentary candidates.  The site has been tested on over 250 of the UK's most popular phones.  Visitors can use iVote2010.co.uk to contact their PPC's by phone, text or email. It also provides help in registering to vote - with the phone number and address of their local council.

Contact Terence Eden Site: http://iVote2010.co.uk

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.