Tag: government

Digital inclusion goes mobile

bird learns to use phone

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 Read More »

Show me the money

guardian-coins-dataviz

URL: guardian.co.uk/datablog/…infovis (fullscreen version)

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about public spending, amidst a global recession, countries in crisis and theĀ emergency budget.

The Guardian has been following this closely and, when the UK Treasury released “Coins“, its huge database of Government spending, the Guardian invited a small group of programmers and experts to work with them and help unravel the hidden stories buried beneath the data.

Brought in by Rewired State, I worked with others from the Open Knowledge Foundation and MySociety on data visualisations and articles for the Guardian Data Blog. Read More »

Teen Hackers Take Over Google

Hacking in full swing (by harry-m)

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. Read More »