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.

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

This month, we’re taking great pleasure in helping out both the London and Brighton Twestivals on the 12th of February. We’re donating a mind-expanding, floaty prize to the London Twestival raffle, and we’re a main sponsor for the Brighton Twestival.

Why the sponsorship?

As ever, we’re interested in helping out with events that are run for the community and by the community. This time, we’re extra-enthused because the Twestivals also embody several other passions of ours:

1. We love gatherings where positive, chance meetings happen between like-minded people.
2. We want to support events in aid of charities (all proceeds help Charity:water‘s efforts to bring safe drinking water to the world).
3. We’re excited about events that have been enabled by social media (in this case, the ever-growing community on Twitter), where online communities create events in their very own neighbourhood.

What’s this about Twitterers floating?

At the London Twestival, one lucky raffle winner will win our prize of a year’s supply of float tank sessions.

Sometimes you need a rest from all the hubbub, wittering, twittering and chasing about. At London’s float centre, Floatopia, you’ll find a haven from the mad rush of life in a warm, relaxing, womb-like pool:

Whilst suspended in a dense Epsom salt solution, warmed to skin temperature, one soon gets the illusion of floating in air. The resulting sense of serenity and deep well-being will stay with you for days after your float.

(Warning: You may have to leave your iPhone outside).

Six months of the prize is courtesy of Dharmafly and this has been generously matched with another six months by Floatopia. You can read more about the benefits of floating on the Floatopia site or Wikipedia.

Happy Twestivals! We’d love to hear your experiences if you’re the winner of our floaty prize, and even if you aren’t, drop us a comment below and let us know how the Twestival went for you.

Update: Another prize – Green Hosting

We’re also now offering a prize of one year of our 100% renewable energy web hosting for the Brighton Twestival raffle. Best of luck, raffle peeps!

This weekend was SemanticCampLondon (alt) – a grassroots conference of semantic web developers.

Semantics is all about meaning – and the idea of the “semantic web” is to use techniques that add greater and greater meaning to web content. The intention is for computers – as well as humans – to “understand” something of the content, allowing them to make associations with related content and to present options to the web user based on those associations.

When web developers agree about standard ways to add semantic meaning to content, then some pretty amazing things become possible.

Tom Morris and Daniel Lewis did an excellent job of pulling the event together. It seemed to me that they acted as a bridge between developers who approach the Semantic Web from quite different angles. There was a spectrum of perspectives and some tangible synergy taking place…

Niche TV

On a whim, I started using Yahoo Live to stream live video of the conference from my webcam. The service launched last week and is so easy to use – just plug in the webcam and “Go Live”.

It was pretty effective. There were viewers from different parts of the world tuning in, asking questions and educating each other on the fine points of the technologies being presented. In this way, something of the event spread beyond the confines of London. I will try to encourage a handful of people to stream video from next month’s BarCampBrighton…

Compound Microformats

For my session, I put together an interactive demo of Compound Microformats – a way of combining simple building blocks of HTML, so that their combined semantic meaning becomes greater than the sum of their parts:

(Image from Microformats wiki)

We talked about people innovating on new patterns for combining microformats. We also discussed whether software that understand microformats should consider the configuration of compounds, to glean something more of the semantic meaning intended by the coder.