The piece I didn't write in the Guardian

Today I didn’t write a piece for the Guardian website. I didn’t set out “5 things volunteers hate about volunteering”. That was another Nick Booth, an eloquent and civically minded Nick Booth.  Not (as the site thought) this Nick Booth.

But it got me thinking about my own experience of volunteering.

One of the main ways we’ve been volunteering here at Podnosh (we are a commercial business) is through social media surgeries. It’s a curious thing, an idea that started as a one off event (based on something Pete Ashton was doing) and grew into a movement with nearly 400 surgeries so far run in 99 places.  I’m also on the board of a local charity and a local arts organisation plus on advisory board of two national ones and have been a school governor.  So here are some thoughts that develop or go beyond those of the other Nick Booth – the one who did write this for the Guardian.

We don’t want to do everything for free.

Just because a volunteer will help one person or group for free, it doesn’t mean they will help anyone. We come across this frequently with the social media surgeries.  Because we run the surgery in Central Birmingham on a voluntary basis it doesn’t mean that as individuals we also want to the run the surgery for Nether Wallop. I’ve had people confused and at times indignant that we won’t get on a train and run a similar thing for free in their town or city.

People often volunteer where they most feel an affinity – either with people or places. I’m certainly like that. My volunteering isn’t driven by what I want to do as much as who or where I want to help.  I have a friend who spent hours volunteering in a psychiatric ward. I really couldn’t do that. She loved it.

We also run paid for surgeries elsewhere. Lots of them.  That doesn’t make us bad – it just means we also have homes and families and we need to make a living.

Likewise not every volunteering organisation is funded.

At the moment the social media surgery movement isn’t – even though it manages to help more than 20oo volunteers coordinate the ways they help each other. Sometimes people treat us as if we have a duty to help them. Most quickly change once they understand it’s volunteer run, but not everyone does.

You might like bureacracy but we don’t.  Honestly, we dont! 

Many organisations that rely on volunteers are prone to produce a lot or paperwork around volunteers.  I know they don’t set out to do that, but by happenstance they develop a bureaucratic culture.  Such cultures often then expect people to give their own time and energy to feed a recording paper-mill, rather than make something better.

This is a big bugbear of mine.  I  dislike bureaucracy.

It’s why we asked Josh Hart (who shares my frustration) to create the website www.socialmediasurgery.com which massively simplifies how we measure outputs and outcomes from the volunteering that’s integral to social media surgeries.  It doesn’t do it later or put anything onerous on the volunteers – it has it all happen as the volunteering is happening. It’s also why we’re working with the Nominet Trust to develop our Impact Assessment Tool (see thoughts on our outreach monitor here) to make it easier for organisations  save time and money on measuring impact.  Doing this smoothly though does something just as important: it helps you keep good relationships with your volunteers.

Don’t think it’s always about your organisation. 

Dan Slee works in a local council comms department but has also volunteered as a social media surgeon and organiseing a local surgery. On his blog he wrote about winning a Big Society Award as part of the social media surgery movement.  He told someone he works  with about the recognition – because he was proud.  They said:

“Oh, so it wasn’t actually local government that won a prize for Social Media Surgeries? That’s a shame isn’t it?”

We don’t always volunteer for the benefit of your organisation – please understand our motives, don’t assume it’s about you.

Don’t treat as if we are less skilled than those being paid. 

Good volunteering will often be filling gaps in an organisation.  It’s really import to listen to, understand and value the skills of volunteers – and trust them to be good at at what they do.  You have the added advantage that many are combining skills with passion – which might be a much more potent combination than skills with pay.

I don’t want to make out that I’m some super virtuous volunteer.  I’m not.  I do the best I can with the time and skills I have and I mostly do things that I know I will love.  Likewise I don’t want to sound grim about volunteering – the stuff I get to do is always a pleasure.

But I do feel better for getting this off my chest – so thank you the other Nick Booth – who you can find here: @OhThisBloodyPC

We’ve been working with Victoria Park primary school to create a visual identity for their new academy status. The school is the first in its area to be awarded academy status and we worked with the pupils to develop a concept for the launch in April.

Through a series of workshops with the School Council (pupil reps from each year) we designed a logo that would translate in print, online, on uniforms and create a wayfinding system for the grounds.

During the first workshop we split the children into groups and brainstormed ideas of what the school meant to them, and words / objects they associated it with. It was clear they admire the diversity in the local area and the strong community spirit. The school prides itself upon its location; within a multicultural city but surrounded by green space. This is something the pupils were extremely fond of, the links the school has to the adjoining (Victoria) park too, and their involvement with the events held there.

We began to explore directions that linked the park with the community. During the first workshop the pupils spoke about planting bulbs in the springtime, which led our research into leaves, flowers and the like. Analysing the family of organic life present in the park, representing the neighbourhood and mix of cultures/ backgrounds. We found seeds and their arrangment interesting, as they represent the beginning of a development process, mirroring how the school is positioned as the place for children to grow and flourish during their education.

Looking at sunflower seeds in particular we admired the beautiful pattern they create, naturally. This botanic process arranges the seeds to create what is called a ‘Phyllotactic spiral’ – that repeats as it grows. Plants, trees and flowers grow new cells in spirals. It happens naturally because each new cell is formed after a turn. “New cell, then turn, then another cell, then turn…”

The formation of the seeds creates three different spirals; gently sloping (21), steeper spirals (34) and very steep spirals (55) – all of these are consecutive Fibonacci numbers. The Golden Ratio (1.61803…) is the best solution to this, and the Sunflower has found this solution in its own natural way.

Developing the concept we began to recognise more characteristics that resembled the school, other than the organic qualities and growth. We liked the way the seeds sit closely together; each has its own positioning and identity yet together they work as a whole.

We presented our ideas and concept for discussion with the School Council. One pupil said he could visualise the logo with lots of children holding hands. These diagrams hold a close resemblance to this joining of hands. The equal distances and proportions suggest equality, something the school is proud of. We explained how each seed could represent a child, a nationality or a language. The pupils liked the idea of picking themselves out, so we went with 472 seeds.

Proudly home to over 40 languages the school has vast cultural diversity. Due to the variety of backgrounds the children are from, it is important to choose a font with great legibility – a sans serif typeface. We explored Whitney, with its clear letterforms and different weight options, meaning it’s versatile whilst its humanist characteristics give warmth, veering away from mechanically produced forms.

We created our own spiral, made from 472 dots – each representing a child from the Academy. We paired with the font and colour palette and through an iterative design process we created the logo, supplying brand guidelines to ensure correct usage and consistency across medias.

Working closely with our supplier we developed a wayfinding system with the new identity for the school exterior. Installing a curved face mono system, 350mm built up powder coated letters and post signs. The logo was designed into the new uniforms and we designed and built a new website for the school. With accessibility in mind, the site has a responsive width and google translation available for the multi-language pupils and parents. It’s also easier to use for the teachers and enables them to toggle a site-wide alert banner to give urgent updates incase of emergency or school closure. All why working seamlessly with the rest of the new brand and identity.

 

We’ve recently had the pleasure of re-designing and developing websites for sister venues the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath and Bulls Head in Moseley. Having worked with Adam Regan (Leftfoot Venues owner) for a number of years now we both decided it would be a good idea to re vamp the sites. One of the main reasons for this was due to all tickets being available to buy through ‘white label’ integration of The Ticket Sellers, which meant a re-jig of the existing events listing functionality.

H&Hs recently celebrated its fifth anniversary as a Leftfoot Venue, and is doing amazingly well with Leftfoot and local promoters putting on sublime shows with world class acts. It’s certainly ideal for me, with both venues pretty much a stones throw away from home.

Kudos to Robbie Jenkins, who’s drawing to the end of his year long study placement with Substrakt, leading the development side of the project in WordPress.

www.hareandhoundskingsheath.co.uk

www.bullsheadmoseley.co.uk

I wanted to add a custom class to the body of a Drupal page IF there was a variable in the URL. In this case I was passing a hidden variabel called ‘window’ in the url with the value ‘popup’, so I wanted to add the class ‘popup’ to the body.

Here is the code you need to add to template.php

<?php
function phptemplate_preprocess_page($vars, $hook) {
  // node-edit class
  if  ($_GET["window"] == ‘popup’){
    $vars['body_classes'] = $vars['body_classes'] .’ popup’;
  }
}
?>

This enabled me to style the body of the page (and any subsequent styles) specifically for pages with the GET variable window=popup.

I wanted to add a custom class to the body of a Drupal page IF there was a variable in the URL. In this case I was passing a hidden variabel called ‘window’ in the url with the value ‘popup’, so I wanted to add the class ‘popup’ to the body.

Here is the code you need to add to template.php

<?php
function phptemplate_preprocess_page($vars, $hook) {
  // node-edit class
  if  ($_GET["window"] == ‘popup’){
    $vars['body_classes'] = $vars['body_classes'] .’ popup’;
  }
}
?>

This enabled me to style the body of the page (and any subsequent styles) specifically for pages with the GET variable window=popup.

We have recently been doing some work in Wolverhampton with the Local Neighbourhood Partnership (LNP), talking to their neighbourhood wardens about how they can use Twitter to communicate on their patch, the sorts of conversations they could be having and showing them practically how to use it.

As I live in Wolverhampton, sit on the board for my local LNP and use twitter in my neighbourhood with @WV11, one of the examples I used when training them was live tweeting from our meetings.

Bi-monthly in each LNP area  there is a PACT meeting, Partners and Community Together where ASB officers from the council and housing associations, and other departments come to talk and answer enquiries, youth services deliver reports on the youth provision and the police attend and local policing priorities are set based on residents local needs. I, as @WV11, have been live tweeting/social reporting from my local meetings for months and last night as a result of our training an LNP in another area tried social reporting for the first time from their PACT meeting.

What was great following the #OXPACT tag (which you can see on Storify) wasn’t just that they were trying out a new way of a communication –  that we had taught them –  but also local councillors were picking up the information and spreading it to their networks too. On their very first attempt at sharing information in this way they were responded to positively and made their part of Wolverhampton a better networked, more informed place.

I hope many more of the LNP wardens in Wolverhampton will be picking up on this and trying it out in their areas and that sharing information in this way spreads further in other cities too!

[&amp;lt;a href="http://storify.com/Essitam/following-wv11-s-footsteps-oxley-lnp-live-tweeted" target="_blank"&amp;gt;View the story "Following WV11's footsteps Oxley LNP live tweeted from their PACT meeting" on Storify&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;]

Over the last 2 days the Podnosh team hosted 24 science communicators from across Europe. They were in Birmingham as part of the Open Places project which is looking at bringing together 69 science communication institutions and other stakeholders in European cities to partner with local policy makers to tackle socio-economic issues such as employment; education; climate change and poverty from a scientific perspective.We met with them to discuss social media and the ways in which it can be useful to them in their workplaces or on this and other specific projects.

We looked at different platforms such as blogs, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. Gave presentations on networking, sharing and listening and had brilliant guest speakers Shane McCraken of Gallomanor talking about the Science is Vital campaign and Jon Bounds who talked about internet culture and memes –  or as one attendee put it – Why cats are hilarious….

It was a lot to digest in 2 days but everyone seemed really enthused by what they had learned so in the final session we asked them to take a few minutes and write about what they felt they would take away with them from the sessions – what had really stood out for them;

Andrea Carlini of  Associazione Festival della Scienza said she has stopped seeing social media as a broadcast tool and now sees it as a way to connect and Jacqueline Homan of Birmingham City Council says we have unleashed her inner blogger and has contributed to conversations and will be contributing to other blogs in ways she’s never considered before.

Abi Bryan of the Science Learning Centre West Midlands realised social media shouldn’t be a one way flow of information and conversations builds up networks and trust, while Lynsey Fairweather from Birmingham Thinktank realised she’d like to create more audio and video content, comment and share more.

Claire Hopkins from Aston University really took on board Nicks talk on social capital noting  ”Not everything we put out into the world of social media needs to be heavyweight stuff. Just engaging with people – on anything – is important as it opens a conversation and starts to build trust within networks.” , as did Karen Gemal a project manager from th Danish Sciene Communication she quoted Nick saying “The loop of generosity generates social capital” and that her first steps will be to “get in the habit of following bloggers and tweets, rss-feeds and get familiar with the universe.”

Alessia Dino, Project Officer with the Associenza Onlus is now much more interested in social media as whole – realising her perceptions of the platforms and their usefulness were wrong before these past 2 days.

Emma Wadland of Ecsite  said she really enjoyed Jon’s session and blogged  ”If you create something interesting enough, someone will take the time to spread it within their networks” while Nisa Vidan commented that this was one of the nest workshops she’s ever been to and wants to start experimenting with Soundcloud and Audioboo.

Rebecca Harding said we had reinvigorated her interest in social reporting and also she should “not to get bogged down with information, but instead save it and share it, this with the help of useful tools such as Delcious.com and Evernote.com.” and Patrick Willcocks of Birmingham City Council realised (among other things) that he needs to upgrade his smartphone!

And finally Pamela Waddell of Birmingham Science City has asked for comments on her post about some of her thoughts on the use of social media in her organisation.

You can find links to all the sites that were set up by attendees along with other posts and sites we discussed in our delicious stack  videos from the event on  both our channel and the Science Places channel on Youtube, photos over on Flickr and see what others were saying by looking up the #sciplaces tag on Twitter.

 

 

The video above shows how some people respond to adversity. Sound it Out lost core funding from the Arts Council last year and since then has been stretching it’s network and imagination to keep going. Tamperine is a stroke of genius.

Last week we set up an experiment to see what kind of Javascript-generated content Google would index.

We created a test page with three kinds of content:

1. Content loaded by simple inline javascript using document.write().
2. Content loaded automatically through an Ajax call.
3. Content loaded through an Ajax call in response to user action.

Our findings are as follows:

1. Inline Javascript  using document.write(): YES – Google can (and does) find and index this content.

2 & 3. Content loaded through Ajax: NO – Google does not index this content.

Conclusions:

Content that is written to your document using Javascript’s document.write function will be indexed by Google.

But content that is loaded asynchronously, for example via an Ajax call, is not indexed.

If you have important content that you need to get the search engines to find, don’t use Ajax – or at least don’t rely on Ajax alone. If you’re going to use Ajax in your website or application, Google provides some guidelines for getting your Ajax content crawled.

Last week we set up an experiment to see what kind of Javascript-generated content Google would index.

We created a test page with three kinds of content:

1. Content loaded by simple inline javascript using document.write().
2. Content loaded automatically through an Ajax call.
3. Content loaded through an Ajax call in response to user action.

Our findings are as follows:

1. Inline Javascript  using document.write(): YES – Google can (and does) find and index this content.

2 & 3. Content loaded through Ajax: NO – Google does not index this content.

Conclusions:

Content that is written to your document using Javascript’s document.write function will be indexed by Google.

But content that is loaded asynchronously, for example via an Ajax call, is not indexed.

If you have important content that you need to get the search engines to find, don’t use Ajax – or at least don’t rely on Ajax alone. If you’re going to use Ajax in your website or application, Google provides some guidelines for getting your Ajax content crawled.

Last week we set up some experiments to try to answer the question “Can Google find (and index) pages with no inbound links?“

The results are now in and they’re quite surprising.

In short, Google is much smarter than we thought. It knows that <a> tags are not the only way to create a link. It can (and does) find and index content linked only through Javascript.

Click here to view the results in full.

Last week we set up some experiments to try to answer the question “Can Google find (and index) pages with no inbound links?“

The results are now in and they’re quite surprising.

In short, Google is much smarter than we thought. It knows that <a> tags are not the only way to create a link. It can (and does) find and index content linked only through Javascript.

Click here to view the results in full.

Generally, Google and other search engines find new pages to add to their indices by following links from one web page to another.

Some search engines, including Bing and Google, also allow webmasters to submit URLs directly, meaning that your site may get indexed even if there are no links pointing to it from the “outside world”. (Links like these are called “inbound links” in the trade.)

But we wanted to know: can Google ever find and index pages that have no inbound links, and that are never sent directly to Google via its site submission form?

We set up an experiment to find out.

In fact, the page you are reading right now is part of that experiment.

We wanted to test the following scenarios:

1. A page with no inbound links, but whose URL is to be found in plain text. Here is just such an example:

   http://www.adherewebdesign.com/experiment/orphans/url-only-no-link.php

2. A page with exactly one inbound link, but which has the rel=”nofollow” attribute added. In theory such links are not followed or indexed by Google. But in practice? Let’s see. Here is our case-study:
   http://www.adherewebdesign.com/experiment/orphans/link-nofollowed.php
3. A page with no conventional inbound links, but which can be accessed by clicking what you might call a JavaScript pseudo-link, like this: <a href=”javascript:document.location=’http://www.example.com/example.html’”>a javascript pseudo-link</a>.
   Here it is in action: a javascript pseudo-link
4. Identical to number 3, but with the pseudo-link attached to something other than an html <a> tag.
   Here it is in action, using a <span> tag: a clickable javascript pseudo-link
5. A page with no inbound links in pure html, but with an inbound link that is javascript generated, rather like .
6. Finally, we wanted to test whether Google follows links from PDFs. So here is the PDF, which contains exactly one link to a page with no other inbound links.

Check back here in a couple of weeks to see the results of these experiments.

 

Generally, Google and other search engines find new pages to add to their indices by following links from one web page to another.

Some search engines, including Bing and Google, also allow webmasters to submit URLs directly, meaning that your site may get indexed even if there are no links pointing to it from the “outside world”. (Links like these are called “inbound links” in the trade.)

But we wanted to know: can Google ever find and index pages that have no inbound links, and that are never sent directly to Google via its site submission form?

We set up an experiment to find out.

In fact, the page you are reading right now is part of that experiment.

We wanted to test the following scenarios:

1. A page with no inbound links, but whose URL is to be found in plain text. Here is just such an example:

   http://www.adherewebdesign.com/experiment/orphans/url-only-no-link.php

2. A page with exactly one inbound link, but which has the rel=”nofollow” attribute added. In theory such links are not followed or indexed by Google. But in practice? Let’s see. Here is our case-study:
   http://www.adherewebdesign.com/experiment/orphans/link-nofollowed.php
3. A page with no conventional inbound links, but which can be accessed by clicking what you might call a JavaScript pseudo-link, like this: <a href=”javascript:document.location=’http://www.example.com/example.html’”>a javascript pseudo-link</a>.
   Here it is in action: a javascript pseudo-link
4. Identical to number 3, but with the pseudo-link attached to something other than an html <a> tag.
   Here it is in action, using a <span> tag: a clickable javascript pseudo-link
5. A page with no inbound links in pure html, but with an inbound link that is javascript generated, rather like document.write('this one here');.
6. Finally, we wanted to test whether Google follows links from PDFs. So here is the PDF, which contains exactly one link to a page with no other inbound links.

Check back here in a couple of weeks to see the results of these experiments.

 

How do scientists let us know what they’re up to?  More importantly, perhaps how do they help us understand what they’re doing?  The communication of science is crucial… and next week Podnosh will be working with science communicators from all over Europe to explore how social media can play a role in their work.

It’s not the first time we’ve done this. We thoroughly enjoyed social reporting for a Europe wide project on communicating science early in 2011.  We were supporting Kate Cooper at The New Optimists and our work helped flush out enough detail in one conference to create a final conference report (essentially) on the day (radically speeding up how these things often happen)

It’s all part of a European project, ‘PLACES’ and as well as finding out about projects from other parts of Europe we’ll be looking at two very successful projects that we know about – Shane McCracken from Gallomanor will be giving the background to ‘I’m a Scientist Get Me Out of Here…’  and the (again) Kate Cooper’s New Optimists  is a great example of how social media can help to grow a project.

Any science projects online that we should be looking at?  Tell us about the ones that have caught your eye.

 

We were curious to find out: does Google read and index javascript-generated content?

Driven in part by the rise of the smartphone, websites are becoming more “appy”, with data and content loading asynchronously through Ajax calls.

So it’s becoming more important to find out whether your jQuery / Javascript / Ajax-loaded content gets indexed by the search engines.

We couldn’t find a definitive answer online.

So we thought: there’s one way to find out for certain: do an experiment. We’re interested in three different kinds of content, really:

• Content loaded by simple inline javascript using document.write().
• Content loaded automatically through an Ajax call.
• Content loaded through an Ajax call in response to user action.

Oh, and finally, try clicking here to load some content that depends on user interaction.

We’ll post again in a few days’ time with the results.

We were curious to find out: does Google read and index javascript-generated content?

Driven in part by the rise of the smartphone, websites are becoming more “appy”, with data and content loading asynchronously through Ajax calls.

So it’s becoming more important to find out whether your jQuery / Javascript / Ajax-loaded content gets indexed by the search engines.

We couldn’t find a definitive answer online.

So we thought: there’s one way to find out for certain: do an experiment. We’re interested in three different kinds of content, really:

• Content loaded by simple inline javascript using document.write().
• Content loaded automatically through an Ajax call.
• Content loaded through an Ajax call in response to user action.

document.write('So, this paragraph is outputted by inline JavaSc'+'ript using docume'+'nt.wr'+'ite('+'). Check the page source and you will see that these words do not appear in the HTML. To help us check whether this text is indexed by Google (and Bing, for that matter), here are a couple of words you might not expect to find here: pterodactyl abstraction.');

Oh, and finally, try clicking here to load some content that depends on user interaction.

We’ll post again in a few days’ time with the results.

In April Cheltenham housed its very first Design Festival. Spread over three days the programme showcased influential figures from the design industry. Set with a Friday day ticket I prepared myself in a sponge like manner, to be inspired. Talks covered all design disciplines, with speakers from an impressive line up of creative backgrounds.

I’d signed up for four talks throughout the day (with a convenient 1 hour lunch break for afternoon tea!). Simon Kavanagh gave us an insight into The KaosPilots, a school positioned half way between a business and a design school. Their values are based on risk-taking and they pride their programme on being in the real world with an aim to bring out “positive social change through personal growth”. Students present their big idea and lecturers support them (no matter how crazy they are). Extraordinary achievements included the Baisikeli idea where a student shipped Danish scrapped bicycles to Tanzania where they’re repaired/rebuilt and sold, with all profit forming the foundation for the creation of a sustainable bicycle industry in Africa. He asked us what our big idea was, I couldn’t quite answer. But the prospect of one idea transforming somebody’s life was quite powerful and it reminded me that as a designer, we all have the potential to shape lives.

Image credit - Peter Stanners

Not as design led as I’d expected, it became clear the event was about all aspects of creativity. It delved into processes, responsibilities, and innovation, it made us question our roles and what we can do with them. Design is just a small part of that collaboration. I also learnt, that it was okay not to understand what’s going on all of the time! Nick Jankel, a life and leadership coach discussed chaos and where progress is concerned – it pays off to go deeper into the rabbit hole, for better results.

Each speaker had a different story, a different perspective but the one thing that remained consistent was the vision. Creative thinking affects our daily lives and also ensures the development of our future. From Simon Waterfall discussing the Sat Nav sucker marks on windscreens (that dramatically increased car crime in a matter of weeks), to Steve Haggarty explaining the cultural shifts in Chinese markets with youth culture and brands.

I think it was safe to say I left feeling exhausted, but truly inspired. It’s quite exciting to think that with perseverance, the right tools and platform – what one individual, or collaboration are capable of.

I have a collection of half baked thoughts following the truly excellent Talk About Local unconference in Birmingham on Saturday.

Whilst they stew into something edible I just wanted to quickly share some very useful links plus a list of ideas generated as part of Make it Local - the work done by Nesta on opendata and local government.

First the links – all mentioned by Jon Kingsbury  (twitter) – who’s driving the Nesta Destination local programme.

• http://civiccommons.org/  is a us website which “is a marketplace for open innovation in government, tracking 585 apps in 199 cities. “  As Jon said – son’t re-invent the wheel, check ideas against this site.
• http://www.listpoint.co.uk/  Jon described as “an open platform for code lists standards”collates a lot of work on data standards, what they means and saves time and energy for opendata work.

Make it Local - opendata and local government programme from Nesta

Make it Local -  was a project that Jon helped run for Nesta which  supported local authorities to work with local developers on open and data tools.   One of  the projects – for example – was Birmingham’s Civic Dashboard.  Nesta created this make it local toolkit. – (download as a pdf ) which gives from very practical thoughts on how to make data work in government more successful.  I cite the whole thing below, simply because i think it’s worth sharing:

Ten tips for creating online local public services using open data

nesta.org.uk/areas_of_work/public_services_lab/make_it_local

1 Generate the idea Focus on the needs of the audience. Look at examples of existing best practice in web services and describe why your idea is better than what already exists.
• Social Innovation Camp sicamp.org/
• Seedcamp seedcamp.com
• Kickstarter kickstarter.com
• Stanford Research Institute’s NABC approach goo.gl/M9w8G 2 Find the relevant data Finding relevant data for a service, in a format which is easy to use can be difficult. Data.gov.uk is the main repository for government data with over 5,400 datasets. Other useful sources of open data can be found at:
• Infochimp: infochimps.com
• Scraperwiki: scraperwiki.com
• Datamarket: datamarket.com
• Guardian Data Store: guardian.co.uk/data
• Or you can ask for data if it can’t be found elsewhere: whatdotheyknow.com 3 Understand the problem Within the area you’re developing, gather together people with knowledge and expertise. For example, there will probably be council officers with deep knowledge of the data, community issues and supplier details as well as any technical knowledge and an understanding of any legal issues. Engaging with these stakeholders early on can help you to map out and solve potential problems.
• Human Centred Design Toolkit by IDEO: ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit 4 Understand open data There’s a movement to open up government data, so that it can be easily found, is in a ‘machine readable’ format and has a license to be re-used. This is to be managed by the Government’s Public Data Corporation. The license of data is critical to re-use. An ‘Open Government License’ applies to most government data (though some agencies are exempt).
• Open Government License: nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/open- government-licence.htm
• Good practice and government data: opengovernmentdata.org 5 Access the data from council suppliers Data is often managed by third party service providers who may have no vested interest in opening up the data. Ensure you allow appropriate time and resources within your project plan to account for this.
Get the data provider on board early and scope out the issues involved in getting the data you want. Make sure your deliverables take into account the dependency on the data provider. 6 Create advocates A good idea still needs advocates to make it happen. This may include both internal advocates as well as external.
Showcase examples of service provision that tap into the interests of different stakeholders. Community activists will engage with ideas that give citizens a voice. Policy makers will want to showcase current thinking.
Find out what excites people and you’ll get a greater level of support from them. 7 Release early, release often Launching with a ‘minimum viable product’ is likely to be more effective (and less risky) than a ‘bells and whistles’ product.Traditional approaches to development often try to specify a full set of features before launch.
A more effective approach could be to use an ‘agile philosophy’ and focus on a core set of user stories, iterating quickly as you go. Enlist the help of some early users (usually six is enough) who can test out the service, you can then launch a ‘beta’ product to a wider audience.
Minimum viable product: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product Agile development: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development 8 Understand public sector procurement

There are strict procurement processes within government that can make undertaking quick, agile projects difficult. Recent Government strategy aims to simplify procurement, making it easier for SMEs to tender.

Find opportunities to pitch a joint proposal with a local developer or agency. If you have an idea or want to pitch for a piece of work try and connect with other talented local developers and agencies to see how you could work together.

Government IT Strategy document: cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/government-ict-strategy

9 Get the language right

We use different words and acronyms to describe the same things and this can be an issue in creating a service for citizens to use. Avoid jargon and adopt a friendly tone of voice.

When creating the architecture for a new service, gain an understanding of how your audience might describe the things described in your data. Card sorting exercises can be helpful in doing this.

Card Sorting Exercise: boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

10 Measure success

How do you know when you’ve made something brilliant? It helps if you know what you’re looking for. At the start, state what success would look like. Identify outcomes and measures for your success.

Tools like Google Analytics can be used to measure the performance of your web service (number of visits, users, referrers). Qualitative feedback is also invaluable in providing useful metrics. When designing your service build in an easy-to-use mechanism for people to provide feedback.

Utilise Twitter and Facebook as well as tools like Uservoice uservoice.com and Get Satisfaction getsatisfaction.com to help gain feedback.