Blog

  • The Twitter blackout and User Interfaces

    Really good user interfaces are effortless. You understand what’s happening and what to do without thinking about it all. This means that the best, most essential bits of good user interfaces are often, by definition, the things you don’t notice at all. This has really been brought home to me over the last couple of…

  • Comment on the Power of Information Taskforce’s report

    The Power of Information Taskforce have been figuring out how to liberate public sector information, how to facilitate better use of the modern, social web in government, and how to support the efforts of those outside government who are doing worthy things. All in all, they’re a great bunch of people, doing great work. They’ve…

  • Scraping Civil Service Vacancies

    Back in July, we were asked to make a prototype system for the Central Office of Information and the Cabinet Office. For some time, they have wanted to put civil service job vacancies together in one place so people can find them more easily and reuse the data in their own applications, much as we…

  • ConsultationXML: the mashups have landed

    People have already started doing interesting things with ConsultationXML. I have to admit — I couldn’t be more pleased! Richard Goodwin took PDF attachments from the London Gazette, uploaded them to ConsultationXML, got the HTML preview output and fed it into Wordle — and voila! A Wordle map of the London Gazette’s honours list was…

  • Innovation in Government: SchoolClosures.org.uk

    I was at the UKGovWebBarcamp last weekend, and among the talks I attended was one by the Directgov Innovate team. This team has been recently formed, and is a really good development. In their own words: Directgov have created the innovate.direct.gov.uk developer network to inform the greater developer community about available resources, to provide a…

  • ConsultationXML: getting reusable data out of horrid PDFs

    Over the last few months, we’ve been working with Steph Gray of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills on making consultation documents easier to reuse. DIUS are doing some fantastic things with consultations. Typically, a formal consultation is a pretty tedious process: a department will write up a big PDF document, print it, send…