Blog

  • ConsultationXML Update

    Mark Little kindly reported some bugs in the ConsultationXML distribution. The INSTALL file was missing a couple of salient details: We had also unwittingly left some Javascript in the codebase, which was responsible for displaying the welcome page that you’ll probably have seen in the sandbox. This isn’t supposed to be a part of the…

  • ConsultationXML is now Open Source

    We’re terribly, fantastically pleased to announce that after a bit of wrangling, Steph Gray and I are able to release ConsultationXML as open source software under the GNU Affero license. The recent report on open source software in Government hinted that departments ought to try to release source code for the software they commission, and…

  • The Twitter blackout and User Interfaces

    Really good user interfaces are effortless. You understand what’s happening and what to do without thinking about it all. This means that the best, most essential bits of good user interfaces are often, by definition, the things you don’t notice at all. This has really been brought home to me over the last couple of…

  • Comment on the Power of Information Taskforce’s report

    The Power of Information Taskforce have been figuring out how to liberate public sector information, how to facilitate better use of the modern, social web in government, and how to support the efforts of those outside government who are doing worthy things. All in all, they’re a great bunch of people, doing great work. They’ve…

  • Scraping Civil Service Vacancies

    Back in July, we were asked to make a prototype system for the Central Office of Information and the Cabinet Office. For some time, they have wanted to put civil service job vacancies together in one place so people can find them more easily and reuse the data in their own applications, much as we…

  • ConsultationXML: the mashups have landed

    People have already started doing interesting things with ConsultationXML. I have to admit — I couldn’t be more pleased! Richard Goodwin took PDF attachments from the London Gazette, uploaded them to ConsultationXML, got the HTML preview output and fed it into Wordle — and voila! A Wordle map of the London Gazette’s honours list was…