RapidHackr

One of the apps we worked on at Rewired State’s DotGovLabs Weekend event was RapidHackr. RapidHackr is pretty much project management for hack days. Whereas with traditional project management systems projects may be worked on over weeks or months, hack days last for a matter of hours at the most! This called for a different approach.

The idea came about mid-way through Sunday when I’d finished building my other project, Digital Champions, and was looking through the EtherPad our team had setup to see what other ideas we could maybe work on. We stumbled upon the fact that we’d been using the same set of tools for the past few hack days, and then the idea hit us that we could build a tool which just helped to co-ordinate rapid development. After all, regardless of whether the project won or not (or even if it was finished in time!), we would still end up with a great tool we could use in the future. I started work on a Rails app and Josh got to work on the frontend user interface, and soon we had a decent project system where milestones could be created and statuses could be posted. We also embedded our EtherPad into the bottom of the page. Additionally, private “rooms” could be created so that teams working on several projects could choose to host them at a secret URL. To top-it-off, we added a countdown timer to the corner of the page which counted down to the weekend deadline.

There were lots of things we didn’t manage to add in time, but would love to add to the project in the future. Tags can be added to a project, so we would like to be able to use them to suggest data sources from Data.gov.uk to help kickstart an open data project – for example a project tagged with “tfl” would result in TfL data sources being suggested in the sidebar. We’d also like to add built-in voice chat, which could possibly be done with a jQuery Plugin like Phono. Finally, we could add a generic idea board where ideas could be brainstormed in the early stages of a hack event, and then taken through to be a full project.

Hopefully we’ll get some chance to continue to develop this app when we get some free time, but our half-complete source code is on GitHub if you’re interested in taking a look.

Rewired State: DotGovLabs Weekend

It’s been an absolutely great weekend. Emma’s blog post sums it up pretty well. Our team won two prizes and made a whole load of apps which we’re really pleased with. Again, massive thanks to Emma, the Rewired State team and the sponsors for making it possible.

Where Are The Cuts?

The last two weeks, myself and Richard Pope have been building a Ushahidi-based site for the Open Knowledge Foundation to track tomorrow’s Spending Review cuts at a local level, such as closing down libraries, arts projects, and schools. Over the course of the afternoon as the cuts are announced, we can build up a picture of how widespread the effect of the cuts will be.

Hello Young Rewired State Manchester

I can’t make this year’s Young Rewired State, but I’m going to pop along to the pre-event in Manchester this Thursday. It’s at MadLab and should be really good. Even if you’re interested in open data but not that interested in the hack week, come along and you’ll find it really interesting!

Government Websites and WordPress

The latest release of data from the Government highlights the costs of Government websites from April 2009 to March 2010. It gives a somewhat-detailed breakdown of the costs of 47 websites, along with the number of visits for the same period of time.

There are some sites there which have cost the taxpayer shocking amounts of money – including Business Link, which cost over £6m just for planning, over £4m for building and £4m for testing! On top of that there was £15m content provision costs and a staggering £4m per year to host – all for just 16m visits. Compare that with the WordPress-based Number10.gov.uk website, which receives almost as many visits – just short of 12m last year – but costs only £86k a year to host. Another WordPress-based site, Bis.gov.uk, received just over 1m visits last year, yet cost a measly £5k to host. Just to put that into perspective, you could host the BIS website at those costs for 1,250 years – over a millenium – and it would not even cost as much as it did to just plan Business Link!

Compared to the large Serco-made mess of the Business Link site, WordPress is clean and efficient, and doesn’t require a large infrastructure to run well. I suspect a large part of the Business Link £4m hosting fund is down to MS server license fees. The fact that WordPress comes with a user system and content management cuts out the costs of developing these too (which aren’t usually done too well, anyway). Using WordPress across the government keeps things consistent, and would keep training costs down in the long-term, as website staff won’t necessarily have to undergo much training if they’re moving from updating a WordPress website to another WordPress website.

There are many smaller WordPress sites within the Government, however no others are big enough to have been covered by the dataset released. Hopefully in the future they will be.

In the new age of budget cuts it will soon become clear that, inside Government, sites which have a smaller footprint when it comes to infrastructure, along with smaller initial development costs will survive the axe – which is soon going to fall on sites which have ridiculously large budgets and hosting costs.

UPDATE: Turns out the BIS site is not using WordPress anymore. It was doing last year, probably was just an interim site.