memespring

Last weekend Jermey Gould organised a barcamp for government geeks at Google’s London HQ. There was a good mix of GovGeeks, the ‘civic hacking’ types of mySociety and FarmSubsidy.org, and people from startups like School Of Everything.

I’ve long wondered why there was such a cultural divide between the startup geek scene and the government / voluntary sector and how best to start mixing things up a bit. After last weekend I think that gap might be a bit smaller.

There’s no lack of enthusiasm with the GovGeeks, but they seem to feel constricted by the currently slow moving, contract orientated ways of the civil service, as well as the ever changing grand plans from above of the more strategic looking civil servants (someone presented a truly mind-boggling-design-by-commitee flowchart of how the future version of direct.gov.uk is supposed to work).

One excellent example of what is possible was provided by John Sheridan of Office of Public Sector Information who seems to have agonised over every id and class name of their newly re-htmled Bills to produce some truly semantic markup. He explained the attention to detail by saying that producing good online versions of these documents was a core part of the country’s information infrastructure - as important as building good roads is to the country’s transport network.

One of the google workers who was looking after us for the day (googlers apparently) said that one of the great things about working at google is the number of unofficial, experimental mashups and xml feeds flying about, from which great things bloom. If all government departments did what the John and the ODSP and Wansbeck Councilhave done, it could be the same in UK government.

– I gave a short talk about Planning Alerts which is available here and Rob Mckinnon’s one on Networked Democracy here (PDF).