Blog posts by Harry Metcalfe

People have been talking about the Ordnance Survey rather a lot recently. It’s a very strange beast. It has mountains of really useful data: electoral boundaries, postcode databases and the locations of all sorts of buildings, not to mention roads, railways and green spaces. Unfortunately, it’s a quasi-independent body, which has to pay its own […]

Last week, we finished a new project. MySociety commissioned us to produce ScenicOrNot. They want to create a “database of scenicness”: something that identifies pretty places and their locations. They came to us with the idea for the site, and we put it together for them over a couple of weeks. The idea behind ScenicOrNot […]

One of the problems with working with large datasets — especially when you’re scraping them — is that they don’t always work the way one might think. We’ve recently had reports that JobcentreProPlus.com turns up jobs that aren’t close to the postcode that the user entered when they started their search. We’ve done a bit […]

Here’s a story from FreeOurData which is, quite frankly, incredible. The Office of National Statistics, in preparing for the next census, has found that the postcode databases offered by the Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey aren’t accurate enough for their purposes. Their solution: to build their own database. This is fair. The postcode database is […]

On Saturday I was at RewiredState. A bunch of geeks got together to build things. We wanted to show government how it’s done! At the end of the day, we each got two minutes to present what we’d done to each other, and an assemblage of government types. People did some really cool stuff, from […]

On Thursday, we ran this month’s UKGovWeb Teacamp — a strangely named event that brings together civil servants and contractors working in e-comms and digital engagement with each other, and anyone else who’s interested and wants to come along to talk about government and the web. This month, Jenny came along to talk to people […]