Blog

  • JobcentreProPlus, tricky geocoding and unreliable datasets

    One of the problems with working with large datasets — especially when you’re scraping them — is that they don’t always work the way one might think. We’ve recently had reports that JobcentreProPlus.com turns up jobs that aren’t close to the postcode that the user entered when they started their search. We’ve done a bit…

  • The Office of National Statistics and Postcodes

    Here’s a story from FreeOurData which is, quite frankly, incredible. The Office of National Statistics, in preparing for the next census, has found that the postcode databases offered by the Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey aren’t accurate enough for their purposes. Their solution: to build their own database. This is fair. The postcode database is…

  • Rewired State: JobcentreProPlus

    On Saturday I was at RewiredState. A bunch of geeks got together to build things. We wanted to show government how it’s done! At the end of the day, we each got two minutes to present what we’d done to each other, and an assemblage of government types. People did some really cool stuff, from…

  • The UKGovWeb Teacamp

    On Thursday, we ran this month’s UKGovWeb Teacamp — a strangely named event that brings together civil servants and contractors working in e-comms and digital engagement with each other, and anyone else who’s interested and wants to come along to talk about government and the web. This month, Jenny came along to talk to people…

  • ConsultationXML Update

    Mark Little kindly reported some bugs in the ConsultationXML distribution. The INSTALL file was missing a couple of salient details: We had also unwittingly left some Javascript in the codebase, which was responsible for displaying the welcome page that you’ll probably have seen in the sandbox. This isn’t supposed to be a part of the…

  • ConsultationXML is now Open Source

    We’re terribly, fantastically pleased to announce that after a bit of wrangling, Steph Gray and I are able to release ConsultationXML as open source software under the GNU Affero license. The recent report on open source software in Government hinted that departments ought to try to release source code for the software they commission, and…