RewiredState

Mar 9, 2009 · 2 minute read

RewiredState was awesome. 100 or so geeks plus a smattering of government types gathered in the shiny new Guardian offices in Kings Cross on Saturday to hack (the Government).

Some events like this are more productive than others, and the end of day demos included some realy impressive stuff. See for your self on the projects page

My own little project even won a prize (an invisible bottle of Champagne no less). My complain was that if you want to report an issue about the over 7000 government websites you have to do it per site. All of the sites do their own thing, which might be a nice contact form, maybe an email address or in some cases a postal address hidden on a page that’s not linked to from anywhere.

My solution was pretty simple - a centralised issue reporting and navigating tool. So you go along to the site you have an issue with and hit a bookmarklet (or a badge on the site if the site in question have been nice enough to add one). You fill in a very simple form which appears before your eyes and everything is tracked on a nice shiny website.

The advantage of all that is transparency. You can see which sites people have issue with, and also ideally which issues get addresses or at least acknowledged by the support staff for the site in question. The hack had comments so others could follow up on individual issues. It would be simple enough to have league tables and the like as well, or add tagging for a little bit of categorisation - I did only have a few hours though.

After a few nice comments I’m going to have to finish it off and get it up somewhere I think. All I really need to do is clean up the bookmarklet code (which was a hack in more ways than one) and add a bit of sanity checking to data entered into the system.

A massive well done to everyone involved is in order as well, especially James who I remember talking to the idea about ages ago. Congratulations all - and hopefully be back next year.