National Hack the Government Day and Rewired State: Culture
You might remember Young Rewired State held at Google’s UK offices in August last year. It was fantastic, and several really good ideas came out of it. Towards the end of March, Rewired State – an awesome bunch of people who organise hack days to show the government the benefits of open data – held a few more events over a series of weeks which were aimed at furthering this goal. I was lucky enough to be able to attend National Hack the Government Day, and Rewired State: Culture held the following weekend, both at The Guardian’s offices at King’s Place.
National Hack the Government Day was really fantastic. I met a load of people who I knew from Young Rewired State, and was thrilled and extremely grateful that other devs would happily lend me a hand with my project. I decided to look at the Digital Economy Bill, and soon took up @charlesarthur’s challenge to try and develop a tool to compare differences between subsequent revisions of a Parliamentary Bill – something which he originally described in a Guardian article, and I discussed in a post on the Tomorrow’s Web blog before the event.
I first decided to look at the PDF versions of Bills – after all, they came in one file which contained everything, and I could just strip away all the headers and footers, line numbers and page numbers, and it would all be fine, right? Nope. After doing all that, I ended up with paragraphs of text with odd line breaks, formatted for print, yet rather unreadable by machine. I went back to the drawing board. I was rather reluctant to use the HTML versions because I knew they contained even more external formatting such as the site headers and footers, but I was determined to give it a try. With a little beginner Ruby help from Ben Griffifths, I scraped the contents page of a Bill, grabbed all the links to other sections of the Bill and scraped the contents of those as well. I stripped away all the nonsense such as line numbers and page numbers and combined it all together to get a finished, clean copy of a Bill. I then modified some code written by Ross Scrivener to compare the two bills and it worked really well.
After adding a caching layer, I’ve made it available for download here, and an online version has been kindly hosted by GetAVote.org here. The Rewired State project page for more info can be found here. I won a Vodafone 360 phone* for my project, along with a project called expendituremap. There were some really cool projects shown at the presentation, which ran alongside the presentation for the DotGovLabs event.
The following Saturday, I was back again for Rewired State: Culture. After having some really nice bacon barms on arrival at The Guardian, I worked with James Darling, Dan Morris, Johnathan Lister and Lawrence Job (who I worked with on TFHell last year 
) to create TAPCulture, a concept to encourage young people to visit cultural venues such as museums and art galleries through location-based social networking. We mainly made more of a concept, but James and I did manage to geocode every museum and art gallery in the UK (resulting in a ban from the Google Maps API), so you could type in your town and see all the museums nearby.
I thoroughly enjoyed both events, mainly because of the amazing developers who attend, the fantastic people who organise them and the great sense of community spirit you get when you’re working on a project. I can’t wait for the next events and give a massive thanks to everyone who helped make it what it was.
* Quite bizarrely, the phone was in Spanish, the power supply was European and the phone is locked to Vodafone Spain. Any help would be appreciated in getting it unlocked for use in the UK