Ideas

Ideas — 6 Comments
3
Oct 11

In praise of slow computing

Usually I work on a big, fast, smooth iMac. It can handle pretty much whatever I throw at it. Dozens of apps open. 50 browser tabs. 30 editor tabs. Half a dozen tiled windows. It’s got oceans of crisp screen space. It barely breaks a sweat even when I do.

But lately I’ve been working on a 10-inch netbook. It’s got a paltry 1GB RAM, a screen that’s 70% smaller than the Mac’s and a crummy hard drive that wheezes along if you have the temerity to open more than three apps and five browser tabs at once. By any objective standard it’s junk.

Yet since switching to the netbook I’ve never been so productive.

I was going to get rid of the netbook. I’ve hardly used it in years. The battery packs up after little more than an hour. The screen is horribly fuzzy compared with the sharp Apple kit by which I’ve been spoiled. The machine gets really hot on the bottom and the heat comes up through the keyboard making typing for any length of time quite uncomfortable. The pre-installed OS is Windows XP — not really my cup of tea. Occasionally I used it for trying out Linux distros but mostly it just sat in a drawer.

But then I thought it might be fun to have a spare machine for casual use. I installed the latest Ubuntu Linux and gave it a spin. Not bad compared with previous efforts but not a patch on the Mac for photos, videos, music and web browsing. On this old machine it was really sluggish too. Moreover, the netbook’s 80GB hard drive wouldn’t hold very much of my media collection.

Yet I still wanted to keep separate machines for work and play. Jack Cheng’s article on habit fields argues that digital devices make it very hard to make a psychological separation of things and tasks. Before mass-market computing each object typically performed one task: we made calls on the telephone, took photos with our cameras, read books and watched the TV. Now we can do all those things with the smartphones in our pockets. Likewise our computers are multifunction devices. For many of us, the computer we work with during the day is the same one we relax with in the evening. We end up not being able to concentrate as well as we could when we’re working and not really being able to switch off when the work’s over. The activity may be different but the physical context is the same.

So if the netbook is useless for entertainment, how about using it for work?

I write software. The only desktop apps I need are a browser, a text editor and a terminal. The rest of my tools run in the command shell. The netbook can handle that fine.

The netbook is still slow but it’s a good kind of slow. The text editor is just fast enough to keep up with my typing. There isn’t space to open more than five editor tabs but that’s enough. Any more than that and I’d spend too much time hunting through them for the file I wanted.

It’s the same with the browser. It gets really slow once you go over five or six tabs. But that pain of knowing that popping open an extra tab has a real cost keeps my browsing very focussed. Find what you want, close the tab and get back to coding. Sometimes I just fire up a text-only browser in my terminal and use that instead of my graphical browser. It’s faster and you can only have one “tab” at once. It’s good enough for most jobs.

I make one concession to comfort: I use a full-size Apple aluminium keyboard plugged into the USB rather than the netbook’s cramped built-in keyboard. Ubuntu has a keyboard profile for it that saves any messing around with custom key bindings.

It’s too early to say whether the quality of my code has improved but I know this: hasty code is crappy code. Writing good software needs a considered and contemplative approach. It’s not about bashing out code as quickly as possible. It’s about doing things right. A computer that forces you to slow down and think before you write is a definite advantage. If you’re looking for a tightly-focussed work computer that keeps you on track, your dream machine could be that old laptop tucked away in a cupboard that you haven’t quite got around to selling. Give it a go. You might find that less haste really is more speed.

The setup:

Ideas / Mash the State / open data / Strategy — 2 Comments
13
Oct 09

Great council websites aren’t enough. We need 1% for open data.

BBC News has run a government open data story today featuring Mash the State, Openly Local, Pic and Mix and Socitm. There’s probably not much there that will be news to avid open data followers familiar with these projects but by all means go and have a read. While there has been much talk and a fair bit of action on open data lately (not least Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s appointment to advise the government) the situation on the ground is still that most councils aren’t embracing open data and show little signs of interest.

Media reports often feature cutting-edge projects such as Kent County Council’s Pic and Mix and can distort the public perception away from the reality that the great independent civic websites using public data are mostly having to scrape and steal it. Very few councils will even acknowledge them, let alone co-operate with them.

Our campaign to get councils to create RSS feeds intentionally gives them the easiest possible first step into the open data world — just put up an RSS feed of your news and we’ll be smiley. Yet only 27% of councils even manage that.

The relatively greater movement of councils towards social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, while not to be confused with genuine open data initiatives, is encouraging because it shows many councils’ willingness to engage users online in the places where they want to go rather than insisting that the only council web activity will happen on the council’s own site.

Despite Socitm’s Better Connected process and laudable efforts among many councils to improve their websites, the unavoidable conclusion is that councils often aren’t the best organisations to create e-government services for the public. Councils’ own websites will decline in importance accordingly.

As more people get connected and want to do more with their councils online, having a great council website won’t be enough. That’s why today Mash the State is calling for councils to dedicate 1% of their web budgets for open data projects.

Why is this?

1. People want choice. As we see with social media and RSS users, many people want and expect to be able to interact with their councils online using the websites and tools which they prefer and with which they’re familiar. And why shouldn’t they? For any council serious about engaging the public, saying “It’s our way or the highway” will no longer do.

2. Boundaries are barriers. Council boundaries and departmental responsibilities are inevitable artifacts of organising collective work but users often don’t know who’s responsible for dealing with their issue, nor do they particularly care. Why should they? IT can give citizens the ability to navigate civic life in ways that are often agnostic to the bureaucratic structures of government and to work with multiple government organisations and departments simultaneously and seamlessly. Fix My Street provides a great user experience because users don’t need to know which council is responsible for the fault they’re reporting nor find the relevant contact point within that council. It works the same way for everyone, everywhere. No single council could match that level of ease and utility. The only way to improve on Fix My Street would be to create a similar system with national scope.

3. Computing is growing, expectations are rising, budgets are shrinking. The relentless pace of technological development leaves councils running (and losing) a frantic race to catch up. Things will only get worse for councils that make it hard for people to reuse their content in ways that suit them and create third-party interfaces to their services. Just as the council gets its new website (which may have to last fundamentally unchanged for 3-5 years) along comes the next big thing and already it’s outdated. People want videos and podcasts, to be able to follow various council activities across a range of social media sites, they want iPhone apps and mobile web capability. We don’t know what they’ll want tomorrow but we can reasonably assume that councils often won’t have the skills in house to satisfy those expectations nor the budgets to hire specialists to do it for them.

4. Councils don’t have a monopoly on great ideas. With the best will in the world, when councils create web services for the public those services will reflect the ways in which the council wants to interact with the public. When the public create web services they reflect the ways in which they want to interact with the council. Which is likely to provide a better user experience? There is an enormous inertia within councils that stifles innovation, often because of genuine risks or opportunity costs. Usually it takes outsiders to rock the boat. When it goes wrong, some individuals may have wasted their time but the public has lost nothing. When it succeeds, everyone benefits.

The age of technological catch-up for councils is rapidly drawing to a close. Technologies to move content and data between applications and websites are mature and widely-implemented. Councils can no longer bury their heads in the sand and continue to act as if they believe that they have all — or even most — of the answers. The future of local e-government is letting people “pick and mix” the content and services they require using the tools and systems they prefer rather than insisting that everything must happen on councils’ own websites.

For those councils already moving strategically down this path — keep doing what you’re doing. For those that have dipped their toes in the water, take a look at the bigger picture and see where the web culture is heading. How many individuals now have their own websites as opposed to social media presences, remotely hosted blogs and Flickr accounts? How many new and recent technologies have emerged in which you see potential but don’t have the resources even to investigate, let alone implement?

Councils need stand-alone open data projects with their own resources and budgets. Lumping it in with general website work has demonstrably failed to give open data the priority it deserves.

Councils may spend that 1% in various ways. For some it will be an opportunity to create feeds and build inbound and outbound APIs, to integrate with third-party websites and services that have proven track records that provide real value. Councils could build relationships with local developers that are interested in government projects, supporting civic hacking groups where they exist and helping to create them where they don’t. “Hack the Council Day” could be a regular feature in the borough calendar. Or they could simply donate some of that money to new or existing projects that inspire them.

For the 74% of councils that still don’t have a single RSS feed, getting that done might be a good place to start.

Ideas / Mash the State — 1 Comment
28
Apr 09

Hillingdon Council creates an RSS feed for every page

hillingdon-subscribe-to-page
Ever wanted to track the changes to a webpage but found there was no easy way of doing it? The Hillingdon Council website makes this easy by generating an RSS feed for every page.

At the bottom of each page there’s a “Subscribe to this page” link and feed icon. The site also makes these feeds easy to find by putting them in autodiscovery tags, providing a consistent way to subscribe in each browser.

Using RSS as a mechanism for receiving page status updates makes much more sense than writing a custom subscription system and requiring user registration such as on Sutton Council’s website.

There’s plenty of scope for Hillingdon to produce more comprehensive specific feeds for other uses but this is a very useful feature in its own right. Combined with a feed-to-email link on every page to a service like Feed My Inbox it could see a lot of usage.

Let’s also remember that there’s more to life than RSS. Other feed formats and APIs are more appropriate for different types of data such as iCalendar for events.