my name is mwd

Yesterday saw the first of what will hopefully be an annual event – Rewired State. The aim of Rewired State was to get a bunch of technologists together to see what they could do with government data or what they could do if only the government would make it easy to access the data!

We were hosted by The Guardian in their new offices, and about 70 people hacked away on projects either individually or in small groups. Some people, like myself, focussed on mashing up the data we could get a hold of already – some people made websites to find your local NHS dentist, or to take all the sports center data and make it easy to search and map. Other people worked on trying to open data that isn’t easy to get a hold of – for example, mapping flood warnings on Google Maps, opening up data from companies house or made a central place to find jobs near you. Not everyone finished what they started, but everyone came up with something neat.

For my part, I set up a new website whovotedwhichway.org.uk to let me visualise how the MPs of the UK voted on a particular topic. This takes the voting data that Public Whip scrapes from the government, along with some geo information on constituencies available from They Work For You to plot the votes for a particular issue on Google maps. For instance, you can see how they voted on Clause 14 of the Counter Terrorism Bill. Yellow pins for yes, red for no, and you can click on a pin to see who the vote was made by. Still needs a lot of work – for example, any vote held by the Lords is broken, but not bad for a few hours on a Saturday :)

It’ll be interesting to see what comes of all the hacking. You can see a list of projects on the rewired state (including photos for a particular project’s presentation if you click through), and many are already live. Hopefully they will stay live, and others will be finished up, but it’s probably hard to keep the momentum going once everyone has gone home – fingers crossed though that some will get the attention they need to continue.

A big thanks for the organisers – the day passed flawlessly, we were fed and watered well, and all in all I think everyone had a great time. Looking forward to next year already!

Update: The videos of all the presentations are up! You should watch them all, as they’re all ready cool, but the embed is for mine :)

I wasn’t very prepared :)