Young Rewired State has been hard at it all week, with 100 teenage coders working on 30 projects at 14 centres around the UK.
This is the third Young Rewired State, which specifically aims to make offer powerful, important public data available to imaginative young developers for one week. At the end of that, the developers should have improved their skills while showing government and the older dev community some fresh new ideas.
Young Rewired Staters in London. Photo by matt-lucht on Flickr. Some rights reserved
After devising a project and building it all week, the developers will gather at Microsoft's London HQ on Friday afternoon to do a two-minute presentation of their project, with various prizes offered for best in show, best developer and best hack. Though obviously it's the taking part that counts.
I spoke to two teams working from the Nixon McInnes office in Brighton today. The three designers working on the MyCouncil project explained that it's an interface that lets the pubic ask simple questions to their council, bypassing the complex and impenetrably dense council websites where it can be hard to find the information you need, MP's surgery or unnecessarily lengthy phone call. (That's something more than a little resonant of work that the Alpha Gov team has been doing with government websites, though that first phase has now come to a close.)
How the NHS might look?
The second team were building MyNHS using a combination of current NHS data and 'imagined' data, such as patient records and prescription histories. Patients could use the site to find their nearest hospital, GP or pharmacy, then book a GP appointment or arrange a repeat prescription online. Really, these aren't complex functions, but the combination of historic shamefully expensive external contracts for government IT systems and lack of security with public data doesn't inspire confidence that anything this 'radical' would or could happen soon.
Both teams were being mentored by Chris Thorpe this week, formerly of Moshi, the Guardian and ArtFinder amongst other things, who has been advising on what data to use and how to use it, as well as helping the developers keep their code clean. Within ten years - normally a ridiculously long-term range for anything tech related - it is realistic to think that government will have restructured its online services this way, said Thorpe.
"When you use services such as Facebook, Twitter and any social service you have an expectation of these services being about you and around you - and that's not how government has traditionally been," he said. "Government provides services that you can use, rather than those that fit your needs and there's a vast difference between those things.
"But the generation that are here have grown up with those web 2.0 services centred around you as a person, and they expect that government services do the same thing.
Chuck Norris on the team
The MyNHS team developers are all 14 and 15. Lewis Bryant, Tyler Green and James Thompson are from Crawley and are here because their school's IT teacher encouraged them to get involved, while Harry Rickards from Uckfield has already been to two Rewired State events. Bryant, who'd been doing background research and cleaning up some of the data, told me he thinks YRS is important because it gives young people the chance "to have a go at real-life scenarios and try to invent something for the future".
Rickards said he first started programming by learning Java, moved on to PHP and is has been teaching himself Ruby this week. He definitely wants to work as a developer - and for GCHQ. "This has been a good learning experience - I've become much more aware of what kind of data is released and also how much of it is badly formatted. And I've learnt that for hacks you don't have to come up with a polished product - you can have static pages just to show the idea."
James Thompson, once he'd got over insisting that his name was Chuck Norris, showed me how he'd been trying to put together a Windows Mobile demo of the MyNHS app using Visual Studio and Expression Blend, and learning C#. He's not phased by the prospect of presenting the MyNHS demo tomorrow in front of more than 100 people, despite the challenge of presenting a concise, compelling explanation of a complex app in just 120 seconds: "I've never been scared by presenting. I'm pretty confident like that."
More on the winners from Rewired State tomorrow - follow #yrs2011 on Twitter from 2pm.
Jemima Kiss 05 Aug, 2011
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/aug/04/young-rewired-state
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