pages tagged mysocietynoteshttp://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/tag/mysociety/notesikiwiki2014-03-18T13:59:47Zsmile and mysocietyhttp://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/blog/posts/2014/smile_and_mysociety/2014-03-18T13:59:47Z2014-03-18T13:59:47Z
<p>It was a pleasure to welcome Matt Green back to Goldsmiths; I had the
pleasure of teaching him in his Foundation year way back in 2007, and
also for
<a href="http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01cr/teaching/cc227/">Creative Computing 2 (as was)</a>.
Matt went off to work in the digital agency world, first with Euan
Millar at <a href="http://www.disturbmedia.com/">disturb media</a>, and now at
<a href="http://www.smilemachine.com/">Smile Machine</a>. In retrospect it was
perhaps wrong to spend the 5 minutes or so of warm-up act ranting
about <a href="http://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/blog/posts/2014/mobile_world_congress/">mobile world congress</a> and mobile
phones in general, given how much of a digital agency's time is taken
up by making sure that the latest and greatest brand campaign is
directly beamed to everyone's brain; this in no way resembles
<a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL60943W/The_space_merchants">satire from the 1950s</a>,
no, not at all.</p>
<p>Still, Matt managed to shrug off the awkwardness, and talked through
some of his recent projects – the spirit level was cute – and perhaps
more importantly some of the working issues. It was good to hear him
talk about the hours: I paraphrase, but something like “sure, some
people are there when I get in, and are still there when I
leave... but I have a kid at home” is an important message. I think
it's possible that since he is a recent(ish) graduate, the current
students felt that they had enough of a shared background with Matt to
ask him more detailed and personal questions than they have tended to
in this series.</p>
<p>The second speaker for the session was
<a href="http://longair.net/mark/">Mark Longair</a> of
<a href="http://mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> – in one of those “small world” or
possibly “shared background” events, I wrote to mySociety's generic
contact address asking whether anyone would be interested in talking
to our undergraduates about development and technology work in the
third sector, and Mark replied. I don't think we'd actually met
before, but we certainly had mutual friends from our undergraduate
days (not least
<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/02/11/5-years-on-why-understanding-chris-lightfoot-matters-now-more-than-ever/">Chris Lightfoot</a>),
and just as personally, my final undergraduate project was done under
the supervision of
<a href="http://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/longairm">Malcolm Longair</a>. Small
world – how many people with a surname of “Longair” have a
<a href="http://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/tag/mysociety/www.ucs.cam.ac.uk/accounts/crsid%E2%80%8E">CRSid</a> for
<a href="https://twitter.com/mhl20/">their Twitter handle</a>?</p>
<p>I liked the slightly subversive slant Mark gave to mySociety's work –
or at least the emphasis on speaking truth to power. The
<a href="https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request/the-freedom-of-information-act">Freedom of Information</a>
platform <a href="https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/">WhatDoTheyKnow</a> was perhaps
the most obvious of those: by making it really easy to make FoI
requests through a platform which stores the requests and responses,
and makes them public, it provides an audit trail for later
inspection. Also, deploying the
<a href="http://www.alaveteli.org/">WDTK platform</a> in countries with no FoI
legislation is a pretty cool hack.</p>
<p>And of course it's not just one site;
<a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> is a highly useful way of
logging issues, and Mark described the fact that it's effectively a
public bugtracker for local councils as having for a side effect
increasing the visibility of mundane problems to those in power. I'm
not sure that that is the best possible way of relating citizens to
local authorities, but I suppose the status quo is already a long way
away from the best of all possible worlds, and the FixMyStreet site at
least doesn't go out of its way to give Outraged of Anywhere a direct
way of venting noisily.</p>
<p>And then over lunch, my student
<a href="http://www.virtualperformance.co.uk/">Justin Gagen</a> got to talk to
Mark about repurposing <a href="http://sayit.mysociety.org/">sayIt</a> for
displaying the librettos for Wagner operas, to help visualise and link
results from
<a href="http://www.transforming-musicology.org/about/">our research</a> into
leitmotif. In an ideal world, this blog entry would announce the
successful import and display of the libretto as
<a href="http://www.akomantoso.org/">Akoma Ntoso</a>, but sometimes the real
world doesn't work out quite as neatly as it should. Another time.</p>