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

• BBC
• Yahoo
• Guardian
• Public Strategy
• The H
• Conservative party
• the Twitter conversation
• the Flickr photos

We’re proud to be a mini-sponsor of Brighton’s upcoming BarCamp, a revolutionary indoor-conference-camping-type event that’s enjoying growing cult status around the world.

What’s Barcamp?

Essentially it’s a philanthropic grassroots event, run by the community for the community (in this case, Brighton’s New Media and technology community). It’s an opportunity to share expertise, make contacts and learn lots of things that you never knew you wanted to know.

Every participant has to give a short session on a subject they care about. That way, everyone who attends gets to share their skills, talk about what inspires them and has the opportunity to learn a whole host of new things.

What did we do at past BarCamps? See our posts tagged ‘BarCamp’.

Something Green for Everyone

It’s great to be a part of Brighton’s local web development community and we want to give something back, not just as mini-sponsors, but by giving everyone a bit of empowering green goodness to take home with them.

What’s green and goes to BarCamp? Any ideas?

Well, this one didn’t get blogged yet… Back in June, we stayed up all night at the BBC / Yahoo Hack Day in London. The task was to combine data sources and build something experimental – and a little bit edgy.

We forged a script to enhance mainstream news sites (such as BBC News) with a layer of grassroots community content – from bloggers, photographers, and the like. The idea was to propagate the news and views from the streets, alongside mainstream media. The result: ‘HackHUD‘.

It’s a Greasemonkey userscript and it uses a number of Yahooey things (Pipes, YUI and Term Extraction), to display content from Flickr, Technorati and Newsvine.

We were clackety-clack on the keyboard, non-stop for over 24 hours. There were tears and laughter… and in the end, a prize.

» The HackHUD Project
» Install the script (quickly, before the BBC redesign their site ;)

Changelog

• 0.16 – Public release.
• 0.17 – Problem with Flickr photos fixed.
• 0.181 – Wikipedia and Twitter options added.
• 0.2 – Updated to accommodate changes to BBC site & to Greasemonkey.
• 0.21 – Better handling of multi-word tags.

We ran an interactive workshop at BarCamp Brighton: "How to Save the World and Succeed in Business". This is the perennial question for Dharmafly, and instead of telling anything, we wanted to get the answers from the crowd…

We split people into groups and got everyone mind-mapping. Each group had a sheet with ‘How to Save the World‘ written in the centre and another sheet with ‘How to Succeed in Business‘. On each sheet, with limited time, people wrote down related concepts and then connected them together…

There often seems to be a conflict between running a thriving business and working in an ethical way. Much of our society is cut-throat and ruthlessly capitalistic. But we found that many practices complement both needs and there is a common desire for collaboration, integrity and taking an ethical approach.

The future looks bright…