The idea of sicamp was to get groups of programmers and ideas people (not mutually exclusive) in the same place to come up with some using web tools to solve social problems, or just change the way people live their lives for the better.

My offering was barcode wikipedia. The idea came out of a discussion about food tracing following a talk by Jack Thurston from farmsubsidy.org at Bar Camp, the idea being that if you could link physical objects to the web via their barcode you could give people access to a whole host of info about it at the point of purchase. This could take the form of ethical info, food miles, and customer reviews or price comparisons. With the more ethical style info piggybacking on the more selfish price/recommendation related stuff.

It’s not a particularly new idea, but it didnt seem like anyone had tried it for a few years, so it seemed like it was worth having another go. I wasn’t too sure what could be achieved in a weekend, but it turns out it’s quite alot.

With a small group of developers we managed to get a really basic wiki together with a barcode lookup, links to price comparisons, and photos from flickr. We also got a basic mobile app that scans a barcode and forwards you onto the relevant page on the site. (There was a problem getting the app to focus so we ended up having to sort of hack the barcode instead, but the principle was sound).

Anyway, you can see how far we got here, and there’s an example wiki page here.

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).

They can make a real difference to the local community aspects of people’s lives - discussing crime, finding out about local restaurants, ganging up on their local council or whatever. Many of the people who run these groups (especially the email based ones) are often not that internet savvy, but have found simple tools that let them connect with people where they live that have a shared interest.

The problem is, unless someone tells you directly about one, they are all but invisible.

To this ends, I’ve been building a site for mySociety called (sticking to the “does what it says on the tin” naming convention) GroupsNearYou.com that is aiming to map the locations and details of these groups and, importantly, help people find ones relevant them.

So why is this useful? Are people really going to rush to the computer when they move to a new area? That’s part of it, although probably more for the more internet savvy who have heard about the site. There’s a couple of other things though that will (hopefully) make it a useful service.

Firstly, once data on these groups is all in one place you can pump it though an api and start syndicating it to relevant places. e.g. “Reported a problem on FixMyStreet.com and the council hasnt fixed it? Contact one of these local groups and get organised with your neighbours”.

Local government wanting to consult on, for example, a regeneration project will have somewhere to start looking for people.

Also, by aggregating groups together on a single site with nice url’s and structured pages, you start making some of them visible to Google for the first time.

Finally, on the basis that these kind of groups are A Good Thing and can have a positive effect on the area they operate in, I’m hoping that the site will start seeding new groups in areas where an online community is absent. To that ends If you search for a group and dont find one there’s a link through to pledgebank to get you to set one up.

The main challenge in building it has been trying to keep the process of adding a group simple of for people who’s internet experience might be limited to email and a few websites, for whom sites like google maps and facebook may as well not exist.

It takes 4 steps to add a group and the most complex step, actually adding the area covered on a google map requires just an approximate area for the group. Clever searching, which will need constant code tweaking, will make sure that people still find the groups based on the approximate area.

The site hasn’t official launched yet, but is all in good working order and is in need of some seed data. So if you know about a group near you and want to tell people about it get to it! :)

I’ve written a basic wrapper for it in PHP which I thought was worth splitting out from the rest of the code, so here it is.

Weirdly this was the first time that, despite having spent the last 6 months slowly eeking PlanningAlerts forward, me, Mikel and Duncan had actually been in the same room, well tent really, together.

Before the awards I took a peek in our database and we now have the best part of 30,000 planning applications - all geo-referenced and available under a creative commons license. If you can think of something fun to do with the data then the api is here, along with a dump of the database.