Shortly after Nottingham City Council presented at the Google local government conference last year and announced their £15K windfall from AdSense, I took a close look at their site to see what kinds of ads were being served and how they were presented.
Variously, I found numerous ads that seemed to act against the direct interests of the council, preyed upon some of the most vulnerable local residents or were just downright sleazy or inappropriate.
One of the biggest impediments to councils implementing RSS feeds and other forms of open data is a lack of imagination about what they and the rest of the world can do with that data. The classic use case for RSS — reading it in a feed reader such as Google Reader– doesn’t appeal very strongly to most people that don’t already use feed readers. As much as they are useful for some, feed readers are unlikely to ever be used by a majority of web users.
Lately, some councils have discovered that having an RSS feed for their news is an easy way to get onto Twitter. They just post the items from their news feed automatically with TwitterFeed. While Twitter works best as a conversational medium (they don’t call it social media for nothing) simply streaming your news to a Twitter account isn’t a bad place to start.
Another option is delivering RSS by email. Anyone using RSS can easily enable this just by linking their feeds to FeedMyInbox. If you’re using Feedburner, that’s got an email delivery option too. No programming, no list management headaches. Feed-to-email is criminally overlooked by most RSS publishers, many of whom commit huge resources to running standalone email newsletter systems.
Now I’ve created QR Code Posters, a spinoff project from Mash the State to give people another useful RSS tool.
First and foremost, QR Code Posters just makes it easy to print the contents of an RSS feed. Despite living in an increasingly wired world, paper is still massively important. We’re surrounded by it and by and large it works. A paper poster or flyer gives your information a tangible, physical presence in the world where it can be noticed and read without using any technology at all.
But as the name implies, QR Code Posters also generates QR codes for each item of an RSS feed. These can be read by mobile phone users with appropriate software. The phone will then jump straight to the webpage for that RSS item. It’s very quick and very easy. See something of interest on a poster — “blip it” — and off you go with the full page.
Here are some QR Code Posters in the wild. We used Sutton Council‘s feeds for news, jobs and public consultations, then augmented those with a local planning applications feed from Planning Alerts. Stonecot Hill in south London, where this noticeboard is sited, sits on the boundary between Sutton and Merton councils. Planning Alerts lets us pull a single feed with planning applications within 800 metres of that point, from both councils. Perfect.
One very useful feature of QR Code Posters is that the posters are bookmarkable. So here’s a list of all the posters we used on this noticeboard tagged on Delicious Pinboard. The posters get generated dynamically every time they’re viewed online so the next time we visit this noticeboard we can just jump straight to these links and print them out again.
The phone used in the photos is an iPhone 3GS running QuickMark (i-nigma is a good, free alternative). Most smartphones can run suitable software. Search for a “barcode reader” or “QR code reader” for your phone.
QR Code Posters is integrated with Mash the State so if you’re viewing a page for a council that’s got feeds like this one for Barnet you can just click the BP icons to print posters.
Whether you’re a council officer or an information guerrilla, now’s the time to liberate your feeds from the web and get them out into the real world. And if your council is one of the 74% that still doesn’t provide feeds you know what to do.
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.