Rewiring the State for the public good
Local councils could soon be running Twitter accounts which tweet things like: ‘It’s time to put your bin out!’
A twitter client called ‘Epic Bin’ was just one of a number of tools that were being worked up at Rewired State, an event given over to using the web more effectively in the delivery of public services.
There were 28 presentations in all - it was hosted at the Guardian offices - covering topics as criminal sentencing (an interesting presentation comparing today’s sentences with those 300 years ago), and the connections between company board directors (little icons representing the directors got fatter the more boards they sat on).
Quite a few focused on using data from existing Government websites in more interesting ways - for instance providing a service which would allow people search for the nearest dentist accepting new NHS dentists by entering a postcode. (There was a consistent them of providing good URIs for each resource which could be reused, with well written HTML and XML.)
I think these sorts of ‘hack day’ events produce some excellent prototypes, though I suspect when it comes to implementation the 80/20 rule applies rather brutally. (There’s a lot of effort to bring about that remaining 20 per cent of the result.) In any event that’s not meant to be discouraging because there’s excellent value in the networking and the sharing of ideas and techniques.
There’s more on the ‘winning apps’ from the day JobCentre ProPlus and Companies Open House, and on Rewired State projects list.
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