April, 2009

Uncategorized — No Comments
20
Apr 09

Example “House Rules” for community forums

These are the (slightly modified) house rules I developed for Sutton Chat. If you’re starting a new community forum or blog and would like to use them as the basis for your own rules, please take them and modify them to suit you while giving attribution to Adrian Short under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK licence.

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House Rules for Anytown Chat

My aim is for Anytown Chat to be a place where everyone can feel comfortable debating both serious issues and the lighter side of life. In order for this to happen, there are a few House Rules which will be enforced sensibly.

By registering with this website you agree to follow these rules.

1. Be yourself

(Snip this clause if you’re happy to have pseudonymous members.)

Use your real name as your username when registering with Anytown Chat. Anytown is a real place full of real people, many of whom know each other in real life. Using real names rather than nicknames allows members to identify others that they already know and get to know people that they don’t. It also ensures that members are accountable for their words: If you wouldn’t put your own name to a comment, it probably doesn’t belong here anyway.

You are encouraged but not required to show your face by creating a profile picture of yourself.

2. No bad language

Most of us have a broad vocabulary of swear words but Anytown Chat is not the place to use them. Avoiding bad language helps to keep a civilised and intelligent tone to discussions. Use your imagination and where that fails, just restrain yourself.

3. No personal attacks

Anytown Chat is about sharing information, learning and debating. It’s not a place for personal disputes and vendettas. By all means strongly dispute others’ ideas and arguments but if you make it personal you’ll be asked to stop.

4. Respect others’ privacy

This is a public website and everything you write here can be viewed by anyone. Practically, things written here will be permanently available to the rest of the world. Do not disclose any private or personal information about other people, whether they are members here or not. This isn’t Facebook or your private email. The whole world can see what you’re writing.

5. Avoid discrimination

If you hold any unpleasant bigotries about people on the grounds of their sex, sexuality, age, nationality, ethnicity or (lack of) religion, this isn’t the place to express them. Get yourself a blog if you really must. These topics will inevitably come up in discussions but I hope that everyone is able to debate them without making the site uncomfortable for others to participate.

6. No porn

This is a site for adults, not an “adult site.” Don’t post porn, whether words, pictures, videos or links to any of these things.

7. Respect the law

Hate speech, libel, incitement, copyright infringement and obscenity are all forbidden here.

8. No spam

Don’t post just to advertise your website or business. If in doubt, please ask first [create a link here to your email address or contact page]. It’s fine to use your business or professional web address in your member profile.

These rules will be reviewed and changed if necessary in the light of experience.

Enjoy yourself

While it’s not a rule, I hope you enjoy chatting here and that these rules enhance rather than inhibit that enjoyment.

Citizenship / Web design — No Comments
14
Apr 09

Why I’m throwing down the gauntlet to our councils over RSS feeds

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You’re free to republish this article under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK licence with credit and a link to Adrian Short / Mash the State

Today I connected 66 councils to their citizens by making it easy to subscribe to their news by email. It took me around ten minutes. I’d say this was a fairly good use of my time in terms of the ratio of effort to value produced, but I can’t claim to have done it single handed. What made it possible is that all 66 of these councils serve an RSS feed from their websites — and they’re the only ones in the country that do. Hooking those feeds up to FeedMyInbox through the council pages at Mash the State was a simple matter of dropping a single web link into a template and pushing it to the live site. Job done.

RSS is a simple way of getting data out of a website and into another program. The technology is ten years old and RSS feeds are ubiquitous on blogs, on mainstream news media websites and in Web 2.0 applications. The three leading web browsers — Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari — all contain built-in RSS readers. Yet despite running websites costing tens of thousands of pounds annually each, only 15% of UK councils bother with RSS. Nothing could be more symbolic of large parts of government’s unwillingness to think beyond the confines of their own websites than making it practically impossible to receive basic local council information like news and events except by taking a trip to anytown.gov.uk to do it on the council’s own terms.

The ten minutes it took to emailify those 66 councils compare quite unfavourably with probably a similar number of hours I’ve spent trying to scrape Sutton Council’s news into a database, and from there through Delicious into RSS and Twitter. Writing screen scrapers — programs which extract text from web pages and turn them into structured, reusable data — is sometimes tricky but Sutton’s news is trickier than most. The news archive serves inconsistent page structures and even dynamically changing URLs to compete with. I vowed never to write another scraper, though as we’ll see, that’s a promise I soon had to break.

Screen scraping and copyright infringement are the dirty not-so-secrets of the civic hacking world. Show me a useful, innovative third-party civic website and I’ll most probably be able to show you the terms and conditions that were ignored and the data that was taken and repurposed without permission or legal licence. Similar behaviour is not unknown in the public sector itself, in some cases because government organisations are recycling that very same stolen data from third party applications into their own websites. The recent Rewired State National Hack the Government Day saw some incredibly inspiring, innovative and useful projects produced in very short order. How many of these projects didn’t involve citizens jailbreaking their own government to get the data they’ve paid for? What kind of society not only massively impedes but actually criminalises — in principle if not in practice — citizens devoting their own time, skills and money to write software to improve democracy and public services? Our society, it seems.

This has to stop. Hackers have shown their ability and willingness to surmount technical obstacles and run legal risks to get the data they need but less technical citizens simply cannot. No-one should have to. A rich, technologically-advanced and supposedly forward-thinking society such as ours should make citizens’ access to government data so commonplace that it doesn’t deserve comment. No technical wizardry required. No legal minefields to navigate. Just all the data served through common protocols with open licences that permit, well, anything. Then we can focus our time and energy on the considerably more interesting higher-order opportunities that come from actually using government data, not just getting hold of it.

Last week I launched Mash the State, a national campaign to get government data to the people. It’s not a new idea but our method is. We’ll be setting up a series of challenges to the public sector, asking one group of public bodies at a time to release one specific set of data. Our first challenge asks all local councils to serve up an RSS news feed by Christmas. I wouldn’t have bet good money in 2003 that by 2009 370 councils would still be without RSS, but here we are. I’ve thrown the gauntlet down and I’m pleased to see that a couple of hundred people have signed up to our website or followed us on Twitter to help make this happen. The councils have got over eight months to do what in most cases will not be more than half a day’s work to serve RSS from their websites. Others less fortunate will have to persuade their content management system suppliers to enable this feature for them. All have got plenty of time to perform this technically trivial task in time to give the public a small but highly symbolic Christmas present that shows that government in this country is prepared to trust its citizens with their own data.

As for my promise never to write another scraper, it didn’t last long. The very first task to build Mash the State was an hour spent writing a scraper to tease a list of councils from a government website. Join us and help to hasten the day when no-one will ever have to do anything like that again.

Citizenship / Politics — 6 Comments
2
Apr 09

Did police kill G20 protester in London? (Updated: not looking good)

Article title preserved for posterity but it’s clear now that Ian Tomlinson was not a protester and was just walking home from work. Please see the updates in the comments at the bottom of this post.

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Unnamed: The protester who died. Photo: public domain via Guardian

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Photo by Alex Watts.

I’m shocked and saddened that a man died during the G20 protests in London yesterday.

Every death potentially related to police activity is automatically investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. But while their inquiry is in progress, the truth about this incident needs to surface, and soon.

Mainstream media reporting has spun this story away from its most obvious potential substance — policing tactics — to the alleged behaviour of the protesters themselves who the police say attacked police medics trying to give assistance to the dying (or perhaps, dead) man.

The Telegraph dutifully repeats the police allegations as fact without troubling themselves with any corroboration:

[A]s officers went to the man’s aid, they were pelted with bottles and other missiles, forcing them to retreat.

The Times at least paraphrases its source:

The Met said that as the officers tried to revive the man they came under attack from protesters who threw bottles at them

The Guardian is also happy to repeat the story without corroboration:

A man died last night during the G20 protests in central London as a day that began peacefully ended with police saying bottles were thrown at police medics trying to help him.

Meanwhile over on Twitter, @jdodds writes:

Talking to eye witnesses from yesterday.protester who died had symtoms related to a head wound.was seen to be hit by truncheon

If true, this puts a wholly different light on events. There isn’t any dispute that the man died within the police cordon near the junction of Birchin Lane and Cornhill between 7 and 8pm yesterday. Did he die from natural causes? Were these aggravated by effectively being detained on the street, possibly without food or drink? Did he suffer a head wound and was it caused by the police? Did the cordon itself prevent him receiving timely treatment? How did the other protesters react? Violently? Helpfully?

We don’t know, but given that the police have been very quick to tell the tale about the “attack” on them by protesters but were wholly unable to give any indication as to why the man may have died, it’s about time we found out.

As I write there is a protest against the man’s death taking place near the Bank of England, where tributes have been left.

R.I.P.

Politics / Web design — 3 Comments
1
Apr 09

MPs’ expenses: Forget fiddling the rules, give us live data and real transparency

What a squalid mess our system for reimbursing MPs’ expenses is. Whether it’s Mr Jacqui Smith’s much-publicised solo viewing habits, the inevitable confusion among highly-paid, highly-skilled representatives about first and second homes, or the shameless London MPs claiming for a second home despite being within easy commuting distance of Parliament, things have got to change.

Gordon Brown has ordered an inquiry into the whole system. While this may produce useful reforms, former Commons Clerk Sir Roger Sands fears the inquiry itself is vulnerable to political meddling and sabotage. Given the sovereignty of Parliament, this is inevitable.

Parliament is structurally proof against any kind of effective regulation. The final veto on an MP’s behaviour lies with citizens’ votes in the ballot box. But how can citizens be sufficiently well informed to be able to make good choices?

I propose an open database of MPs’ expenses operating in near-real time. The government seem to be very keen on databases for the rest of us so I’m sure they will be keen to commit resources to making this happen.

Every line item from every receipt submitted for reimbursement is keyed into the system. We will be able to see exactly what has been claimed and which claims are pending, approved and rejected.

Every line item is tagged. This will enable people to see not just the claims submitted by specific MPs but to easily make comparisons across the group. Want to see all MPs’ claims for their televisions? It should be as easy as a visit to http://expenses.parliament.uk/tags/tvs

Given that websites shouldn’t discriminate against machines, every piece of data in the system will be available through convenient feed formats like RSS and an open API, allowing programmers to build useful mashups and visualisations of the data.

If the only way to stop cabinet ministers on £135,000 a year claiming 88p for bathplugs in their family homes is to put every such claim online within a week, let us make it so. Given that the historical data is supposedly on sale for £300,000, can we find 300,000 people with a pound each to get it?