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We’re good friends with the people at Mozilla. Every Wednesday, they welcome us into their London Moz space for our weekly meet-ups. They are champions of empowering possibilities of the web through Open Source software (a world we’re part of too). And they’re all so smart and lovely. So of course we’d been looking forward to this year’s Mozilla Festival for some time.
We had a table at the “Science Fair” on Friday night, where we literally had buckets of sweets (OK, they were little plastic buckets). Tom, our director, and Dave, from our international team, talked about mySociety’s work with anyone who came close. Perhaps people were drawn in by those sweets, or the FixMyStreet demo on the monitor, or even the (new!) stickers we had to give away… but regardless of the lure, we think they all learned a little bit more about how our platforms help empower people’s civic lives: from something as simple as reporting a flickering streetlight, to holding a public authority to account, to monitoring a whole parliament. (That’s FixMyStreet, Alaveteli, and Pombola, if you were wondering).
The Mozilla Festival’s venue was, once again, London’s astonishing Ravensbourne, right next to the O2 Millenium Dome. The setting magnifies the wonder of the event. Those big round windows make it feel like being in a spaceship made of Swiss cheese. The place is so open, and so vertical, that the activity and enthusiasm doesn’t just spread out, it spreads up. There is making and teaching, learning and sharing, going on across nine floors, and it’s easy to drift up and down from one themed space to another.
We met old friends. We got to hang out some more with our Chilean brothers-in-code from Ciudadano Inteligente, and the excellent Gaba from Uruguay’s DATA, together with the good people from the OKFN. We made lots of new friends too. And all this didn’t just happen at the sessions. A lot of serendipitous encounters took place by the Alchemy coffee stations. Or on the stairs (khun Toy and khun Hui — hi!). Or in the Alphabet City party venue, afterwards.
So a big “thank you” to that Fiery Fox, and an enthusiastic high five (yes, there was an unLondonlike amount of enthusiasm on show — possibly because quite a few of the attendees were over from the USA — which it is impossible not to be caught up by) to all the people we met at the event. Dave grinned his way through a wonderful Scratch tutorial from Code Club, met a whole array of cool people, got answers to some nerdy coding questions, and learnt about the awesome Hive learning networks… and lots more things besides. That already describes a great weekend. But beyond that, we hope we might see a few new mySociety-powered sites spring up elsewhere in the world due to sparks that were sparked at mozfest last weekend.
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It was great to see everyone at the hacknight on Wednesday. This time, ideas ranged from using the FixMyStreet Platform for reporting of Trading Standards transgressions, to installing a Mzalendo for Greece. We hope that these ideas will flourish, and many others will arise at our future hacknights.
Talking of which, don’t forget to reserve a place if you’d like to come along. Hacknights are weekly. All the details are here.
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Our Wednesday hack nights are fast turning into the place to be – if you’re into civic tech, coding, and chat with friendly people, that is.
Last night saw some concerted scraping of the Leveson Inquiry hearings, which were then imported onto our work-in-progress SayIt platform. Now if THAT doesn’t sound like fun, we don’t know what to tell you.
You’d be welcome to join us – every Wednesday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm at the Open Data Institute.
Numbers are limited, so add your name to one of our Lanyrd pages, or drop us a line.
Image credit: HackNY (cc).
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Over 115,000 Freedom of Information requests.
Almost 225,000 FixMyStreet reports.
Close to 3,000 public transport problems.
Every word spoken in Parliament since 1935.
So, what would you like to know?
There’s no doubt about it, mySociety sites store a lot of data. And once you have that much data, you can start finding the answers to interesting questions. Questions like:
- Which public bodies receive the most FOI requests?
- Which county gets the most pothole reports?
- Which train routes are people complaining most about?
- Which MP has spoken for the longest cumulative time in the history of Parliament?
There are less obvious questions, too – how about:
- Which regions of the country are most likely to include bad language when submitting a form online?
- How many times does the Speaker have to interject, “Order, order!” in an average week?
- Which words are most spoken in Parliament, and which have only become popular in the last five years?
- What topics do people submit the most Freedom of Information requests about?
- Just how often does a UK citizen get so fed up about dog poop that they take action?
We reckon there are almost limitless stories in our data, waiting to be teased out. Some of them will be surprising, fascinating, or just plain funny. Some may even be potential front page news. So, we’ve invited journalists who have a particular interest in data, or indeed in any of the areas we work in, to come and have at it at our first ever mySociety Data Hackday.
Not a journalist?
Journalists aren’t the only ones with bright ideas, so if you’re reading this and there’s a burning question that springs to mind, leave a comment below. Given all these reams of data, what would you be looking for? We’ll add the best ideas to our list, and we’ll be reporting back on everything we find out.
Actually, I am a journalist!
There are still a few places, so if you’d like to attend, please drop us a line. Note: we will expect you to get stuck in! We will run the data, but you may be sifting through the results, looking for significant stories, and sharing your findings. Bring a laptop, and plenty of ideas.
If you can’t attend, but really wish you could, let us know what data you’d like us to run, and we’ll add it to the list.
ETA: Lanyrd page here.
Image credit: Johan Nilsson
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On Friday September 29th mySociety will be holding a volunteers hacking day in Liverpool. Everyone is invited, and we can even cover some train fares, plus a round or three in the pub. To be eligible for the train fare support, though, you Must Live North of the Watford Gap.
The main theme will be to hack around with the new TheyWorkForYou API , and we’ve got a few hundred quid to cover costs from the day as part of the funding from the Department of Constitutional Affairs (the majority of the money has covered Matthew’s costs in building it from scratch).
The event is at Blue Fountain
The timing is 10AM to 7PM, followed by adjournment to some sort of public house. For those of you with work commitments, please consider coming in the evening.
Venue kindly provided by mySoc friend Aidan McGuire. The meeting will also be a chance to meet key TheyWorkForYou and Public Whip volunteer Julian Todd, whose reclusive Liverpudlian lifestyle means we don’t get to see him often 🙂