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Digital inclusion goes mobile

Premasagar — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:42:30 +0000

URL: rewiredstate.org/projects/sms-centre-finder

There are 61 million people in the UK and 10 million of them have never used the Web.
How would you help someone to get online for the first time?

The job of the Government’s UK Online Centres is to help bridge the digital divide, by providing places with free public Internet and hands-on assistance. We recently helped them to explore a new web strategy, as part of a prototyping session at Google London, which was organised by Rewired State.

First steps on the Web, thanks to an SMS text message

People seek out a UK online centre for a number of reasons: to get help emailing their children who are overseas, to fill in a job application that’s available only on the Web, or to join Facebook because their grandchildren are all on there.

But there’s an interesting fact: around 70% of these first-timers have a mobile phone. What if we could take advantage of that fact to make it easier for them to get the help they need?

I worked with Sym Roe, Tom Hume and Daniel Morris on a prototype to explore this question. In just a few hours, we had created an SMS text message service, which allows people to text their postcode to a short phone number, and be texted back details of their nearest UK Online centre.

How it could work

Imagine that you’re out and about. You see a poster on the wall at a community centre, a library or some other noticeboard, and it says:

Want to get online? To find your nearest UK online centre, send a text message to 82958 saying ‘ukonline’ plus your postcode – e.g. ‘ukonline SW1A 2AA’.

We’ll text you back with your nearest centre. This service costs 25p.

You can try it out with your own postcode. Did you realise that there’s a centre so close to you?

Ingredients of an SMS web service

We took advantage of the really easy-to-use SMS service, Taykt (it’s pronounced “take it”), a new startup based in Brighton. It takes the pain out of dealing with mobile networks and registering shortcode phone numbers.

First, we chose a keyword for users to start their SMS message with – in our case, we chose “ukonline“. Taykt then passes through to our web service any message that starts with that keyword. If no postcode is supplied, then we just give a generic response. If there is a postcode, then we convert it to a latitude and longitude, then query the UK Online database to find the nearest centre.

To make best use of the 160 characters available in our text message response, the information we send back is prioritised: first the centre’s name and phone number is given, and then if there’s still room in the message, we give the address, and then information about creche facilities, disabled access, etc. We try keep it concise, but human-friendly. Tom wrote about his work on maximising the text message response on his blog.

Because Takyt lets us pass on the cost of the service to the end user (25p per request), it means it would be a viable proposition for UK Online to get up and running quickly, with little risk or upfront fees.

If you’d like to check out the code, see Sym’s Django-based web service, and Chris Thorpe’s UK Online API.

There’s a write-up of our SMS Centre Finder project on the Rewired State website.

Teen Hackers Take Over Google

Premasagar — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:01:24 +0000

At the weekend, I helped mentor a group of tech-minded teenagers at the community-led event, “Young Rewired State“. Held at Google’s London HQ, this was a two-day, action-packed programme for 15-18 year olds to build something better with government data on the web. And the results were truly impressive.

Young people are sometimes written-off as being apathetic, or handed patronising websites and services to interact with. Here was their chance to show the kinds of services they really want and to demonstrate that, given access to the right kinds of data and a little support along the way, they are more than capable of building it themselves.

In just two days, they created a plethora of new web apps: a mobile service to give real-time info on London buses (“TFHell“), interactive maps with routes to school that avoid local crime hotspots (“SchoolRoutr” and “Step Safe”), sexual health advice (“Blab to Betty”), a service matching new tech talent with employers (“Will Work For Peanuts“) and many others.

The team I assisted were a politically minded trio. Ben, Joe and Richard came down from Manchester and built a website that grabs the latest bills passing through parliament and attempts to show the emotional response to these bills from blogs around the web. The results are shown graphically, using the Google Charts API. The result of this blogs / politics experiment is: “Blog-o-tics“.

Although they weren’t awarded a prize, Blog-o-tics was given a “special mention” by the panel of judges, who had come from government, the tech industry and beyond.

The field of “sentimental analysis” is growing and, although Blog-o-tics was just a quick proof-of-concept, it does hint at the possibilities. Craig Elder noted its similarities with the concept for YourOwnDemocracy.

Other mentors came from Last.fm, the BBC, Yahoo, Moo, My Society and small businesses around the country. I think we were all pretty much blown away by, not only the standard and focus of the work produced, but how entirely natural everyone seemed with the stack of technologies being used. Here is a generation of people who have grown up with computers, the ubiquitous Web and the programming languages used to harness it. Government could really benefit from their input.

The original Rewired State event, dubbed “National Hack the Government Day“, had been held at the Guardian‘s offices earlier this year. It was such a success that many of us who attended were invited to the Cabinet Office to explain just what the government should be doing with its web properties, and we were given suggestions on ways through what can sometimes seem like a maze of bureaucracies.

Since then, no less than Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web) has been invited by the prime minister to help open up government data, to help bring transparency and to simply help those who want to solve problems get access to the data they need. The young hackers from Rewired State are off to a fine start.

Other reports on Young Rewired State

It’s Getting Windy in Here

Premasagar — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:25:26 +0000

After a thorough search, we are now working with a new web hosting provider for the websites that we manage. Web hosting is where a website lives on the Web. It needs to be fast, reliable and supported by a dedicated technical team. And… it needs to be powered by 100% renewable energy.

Web hosting computers are active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keeping the World Wide Web online takes a lot of energy, and we at Dharmafly want to be as responsible and ethical as possible with our piece of it.

100% Renewable Energy Web Hosting

Renewable energy web hosting is fairly common in the US, where companies such as AISO use solar energy for power. However, there are fewer options available for UK-based hosting. Many of the UK-based companies that offer renewable energy web hosting are actually re-selling US-based hosting. This can be a problem for UK-based businesses who want their websites to rank well in Google and other search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation for UK Websites

When people in the UK search Google, they receive a set of results that favours UK-based websites. Google determines whether a website is UK-based in two ways. It will first see if the web address ends with .co.uk, .org.uk or another UK-based name. If, however, the web address ends with .com, .org, .net or another non-UK name, then Google will work out the country where the website’s hosting is based. Clearly, it is important that we can offer our clients UK-based hosting.

In a Bunker

We found a solution. Housed in what used to be a NATO military bunker, Smartbunker is the UK’s first web hosting centre to use 100% renewable energy. It runs purely from wind power, supplied by a wind turbine from Ecotricity.

The energy is actually renewable, rather than it being a “carbon-offsetting” project, where trees are planted to offset the carbon burned by non-renewable energy, such as coal.

(Techie details: We use high-specification, low-energy IBM Blade servers, with Intel Dual-Core Xeon 5148 LV 2.33 Ghz, 2GB Server Memory, 2 x IBM 73GB 10k SAS Hard Drive RAID 1250.00 43.75 and a Plesk control panel for domain management).

Co-operative

We work with Ecohost to manage our web hosting computers at Smartbunker. They are a worker’s co-operative, based at Manchester’s new co-operative offices, OpenSpace. They’re friendly, über-ethical and they really know their stuff.

Together, we’re happy to offer ethically hosted websites for the UK and beyond. If you’d like to get your website hosted with us, please get in touch.

Yoga and the Social Graph

Premasagar — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 16:22:10 +0000

We gave a 30 minute session at BarCamp London called "Yoga and the Social Graph: from smoke-signals to self-realisation"…

We discussed the ever-increasing trend for expansion and connection within society. This is now stronger than ever with the progress from the Internet (a network of interconnected computers), to the Web (a network of interconnected documents), to the Social Graph (or more simply, ‘Social Network‘, a network of interconnected social relationships).

We considered this tendency in the light of the yogic concept of constant progress towards union – on both the individual and collective level.

The discussion was interesting – with everyone offering insights into the process that we see unfolding in the world today. We found it a refreshing chance to take a step back from technical details and consider the bigger picture.

BarCamp

BarCamp is a growing global movement of web technology conferences that follow a model of grassroots, collective participation. The latest camp was held at Google’s London offices.

[See our previous post from BarCamp Brighton]