shane dillon
This is my personal blog spot. All opinions expressed are my own. I use this space to post updates about cinema, digital and politics.
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shane dillon
YoungRewiredState: Hasty overview from a flying visitor
A minor thrill to be at Google HQ in London for YoungRewiredState. As expected the office is filled with bean bags and the west coast calm approach to workplace design. What follows is a rambling report from someone with zero coding experience.
Though just arriving for the final lap and many have been hacking away over the weekend. These are kids and not in the American sense of the
word: upwards to 35 passes you as a kid. No, these were real kids kind of like the kids who skateboard near the BFI Southbank. We've got the comfy corporate seats in what is the presentation room but turn left and some deckchairs are lined up near the window. Costa del Google.
The purpose of all this is to give some young hackers government data and let them mash or mould the stuff into something interesting. For me it's about taking government data and putting it back together into an attractive visual for the public to better appreciate it's worth.
SchoolRouter 2.0 a way to plot a safe route to school. Do mash ups involving crime data encourage insecurity or security? a perrenial question. Map mashups for every conceivable crime?
One earlier was BlabtoBetty think of it as Franks girlfriend. You know Frank of Talk To Frank fame. Once again a simple idea giving young people the confidence to ask questions.
Next up TFhell. Real time bus information. The hazards of predicting a bus arrival time. Putting a bus departure time onto the web is already
a reality in Oxford. Putting the LED signs onto your mobile phone is a reality in other major world cities. Useful app for the time conscious. As an iPhone app this would work but how accurate would the info be? Well pretty accurate as buses transmit to the LED displays all we need to do is get them to transmit to your iphone direct. Do geeks want certainty? Lets have slacker bus services, some would argue we already have.
Transport direct is another hack and thet open with the cost of site being thirty three million. On this site you cannot share or edit your journey information. Called Un-Transport Direct. There version allows you to email your route. Generates an ID key number you pass this on and someone can look at the route. The key word of the moment is share.
Next idea arriving now. National rail services. Called How's My Train? Keeping tabs on train punctual. Mussolini would love this. Allows you to produce a graph showing the punctual of a particular train. This service would be useful for communities to prove how crap their train is and dispute the official version. Trains planes and automobiles here at Google. A fetish to use data to inject more certainty into city life. Empiricist's unite and take over make the world a giant data set. Maybe it already is?
Will work for peanuts a hack to get those on the first ladder into work within tech. Useful for small companies. Registration not essential think I like this site if only for the absence of registration. There is already a Charity that puts techies and charities together.UniCloud looks at course finders. Scraped data from course finder. Simple interface. Stick in search term and the useful info appears. Not really into this one. Gets you the info in one place though.
Stepsafe. CrimeMaps, scary times ahead. Step around the city avoiding the high crime spots. Do these maps give people the information they want or lead to further stigma for particular areas?
The Engage Project. NHS data is next up. Some councils have no API. This sounds interesting but I am not following the concept very well.
Another hack was to look at Broadband availability data and it's impact on it's schools performance. Mash it up and you have the answer. Interesting, this type of data could help a Phd study.
Crime Rate Statistics the bogey man again. Take crime stats mash up with exam results and the answer to the social workers question is? Google maps oh lord help me find a Mercedes Benz or if not an alternative to google maps.
Blog - o - tics. Are MPs representing you. Comparing their actions with what they say in there blogs. Linking Bill's to the mp blogs searching for emotive words. Taking data searching for positive negative. Like this could it work on our blogs. This site is live which is great so I can have a play with it soon.
A site were you can take the driving theory test for free. Free the theory test. Why do this? Some people don't buy data, so free it up and let drivers bone up on driving theory for free.
One hairbrained idea to create an app that requires your passport number so you can verify your age. Feasible but perhaps not applicable and has civil liberties issues.
Just spending three hours at YoungRewiredState shows what young folk can wire up in a matter of hours.
(all views are personal)
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by shane dillon
Comments (2)
Can we create a punctuality graph for Southern trains' services from London Bridge and send said company a copy every month, shaming them with their poor post 8pm services? My views on this are well documented (albeit in microblog format: @philbrownuk)!
I propose secondly an app that allows you to send an email of complaint directly to Tfl from your iphone/blackberry/mobile, every time you wish to use the Jubilee Line on a weekend, only to find that it is, yet again, closed for essential maintenance. Oh, the pain...
I was one of the developers of How's My Train, whilst we were able to parse some of the timetable data from the massive PDF that National Rail provide, we didn't get it all for one reason or another.
We were also looking at using the LDB SOAP API (http://www.livedepartureboards.co.uk/ldbws/), unfortunately, it's limitation of only keeping data for a train for ~2 mins after it arrives means that it'd be a very large archival job.
Added to the fact that to get a reasonable amount of data for just a particular service we'd need to record the data each day for a month or so, meant that there was limited value in spending the time trying to get our heads around the API they provided.
However, if we'd been considering all services from a particular station (rather than focusing on a particular service from the station), we may have put a bit more focus on it over the weekend.
But, my appetite for this data has now been whetted, I plan to continue working on the code to try and get it into a more useful state. (Plus I don't like to be beaten by things)
It may be a while before I can start working on it again, unfortunately, I have several more pressing projects outstanding.
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