Event: Rewired State
I went to Rewired State on Saturday, an event which aimed to bring hackers together to get creative with government data and APIs. The event took place in The Guardian’s plush offices near King’s Cross station in London. Connectivity was provided through ethernet, and there was free coffee all day long. We were well looked after!
Schedule
The schedule was as follows:
- A short introduction set the context for the event
- There were optional workshops throughout the day
- A large open plan office was available to work in
- The day finished around 6pm, where presentations took place of the day’s work
Workshops
The workshops were: TheyWorkForYou API, DirectGov Mobile APIs and a Screenscraping Masterclass.
Food
The Guardian provided lunch in their canteen, and 4ip and Sun provided pizza and beer. There was actually a lot of food, and also an open bar afterwards, so I only spent money on my tube ticket for the entire day!
Project Highlights
All of the projects have been listed at projects.rewiredstate.org. They’re open source, so hopefully they’ll lead to future innovations.
One of the winning projects was a Get Satisfaction clone for government websites. It went down well at the event and had a clean interface, but I can’t find it on the project site. It won one of the prices so I expect it’ll crop up soon.
TransparencyMachine was created by a Brighton contingent of Rewired State, and aims to clearly display minutes from council meetings and allow people to comment. It was among the few finished-looking projects that will hopefully take off in some form after the event.
Companies Open House aims to provide each UK company with a fixed URL that displays their Companies House data. Seeing as the Companies House website obscures links to websites and isn’t available 24/7 there appears to be a need for this service.
Other memorable projects included:
Presentations
Most of the projects attempted were backed up with a two minute presentation. The presentations were all well received and most raised a laugh — especially Find Me A Dentist.
Conclusion
I’ve been to a lot of events in London, and they fall between the corporate sponsored snoozefests to Carsonified’s colourful and informative workshops and conferences. This reminded me more of the relaxed Linux and open source meetups from back in the late 90s, yet with committed participation and corporate backing.
Whilst the event was fun and by all means a success, it would be encouraging to see projects of this ilk continue beyond Rewired State. There’s already good work in the travel and geocoding areas, but more open source mashups of government data could really illuminate government decisions and processes for the public. As we discovered, most sites make scraping purposefully difficult, and APIs can require licensing and payment. Let’s hope projects like Rewired State change this.
I’m looking forward to Rewired State 2010 — if The Guardian are crazy enough to support it.
