Blog

  • ScenicOrNot’s on BBC News

    Just a quickie post — ScenicOrNot, a project we recently completed for MySociety, has been featured in BBC News Online’s Technology section. Predictably, there’s been a big jump in player numbers. We just zoomed past 3000 players, 260,000 votes and over 50,000 places rated. Thanks Auntie!

  • Reforming Ordnance Survey

    People have been talking about the Ordnance Survey rather a lot recently. It’s a very strange beast. It has mountains of really useful data: electoral boundaries, postcode databases and the locations of all sorts of buildings, not to mention roads, railways and green spaces. Unfortunately, it’s a quasi-independent body, which has to pay its own…

  • ScenicOrNot: finding Great Britain’s pretty places

    Last week, we finished a new project. MySociety commissioned us to produce ScenicOrNot. They want to create a “database of scenicness”: something that identifies pretty places and their locations. They came to us with the idea for the site, and we put it together for them over a couple of weeks. The idea behind ScenicOrNot…

  • 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…