Meet Rinske van Noortwijk and Corian Hugenholtz-Sasse – they make wishes come true.
I met them both in Rotterdam, invited through the wonderful Maurice Specht to speak to the Association of Initiative Brokers ( @inimakelaar ) in Holland, organised by Rinske.
Two days before, Tessy Britton and I had been in The Hague speaking to senior civil servants from Dutch central government. Read more
It’s odd how when you look away your friends seem to go and do some really interesting stuff. I first met Willem Guizeman in 2005 when he was in Birmingham planning some work on the Residents university for the Residents for Regeneration. Then he was fronting a Europe wide organisation which was working with the EU.
Last month we saw each other again in The Hague, his home town. Now Willem is doing something much more Read more
Very late on Tuesday night I was asked a question on twitter – can you help get a government site up in short order? The question was prompted by this.
GovSpark is a simply wonderful idea from 16 year old coder Isabell Long that emerged from Emma Mulqueeny’s Young Rewired State. Isabell wrote last month…
I came up with the idea because the government had just released some live and historical energy consumption data, but it was all held on the respective department websites and not central anywhere. GovSpark aims to be the central website for people to go so that they can see what the energy consumption of a certain department is at that time. The government also have targets to reduce usage by 80% by 2050, so I thought it would be a good tool to show how well one department is doing compared to another department.
Because it was Emma asking we said yes. Glyn Wintle had already sweated to build an API which ran off live data for energy use in government buildings in Whitehall. We were given less than a day to help push it across the finishing line by deciding what it ought to look like and making it look that way. Josh Hart coded like a lunatic and the talented and calm Ryan Dean-Corke of Substrakt sorted out some visuals for us.
As the Downing Street website reported this morning…
The Prime Minister has today challenged Whitehall Ministries to compete to slash the energy used in their departmental headquarters over the month of October.
The league table application, called GovSpark, will show data from the 18 Government Real Time Displays. The original prototype for GovSpark was developed by Isabell Long, aged 16, during Young Rewired State 2010, an event run for young developers aged 15-18 working with open government data.
It’s always a pleasure to help something good happen, in fact that’s what we are here for really. The best bit was a short e-mail from a clearly chuffed Isabell
It looks amazing – I really love it! Everything has finally come together! 🙂
In less than a month in total Isabell’s idea has turned into site which is running a blindingly simple competition to help civil servants use less energy. It gives civil servants the information and incentive to switch things off, or find way to cut emissions.
We can only take a tiny bit of credit for helping. The site was sponsored and funded by The Stationery Office and the real work, before our last scramble, came from Glyn and Emma Mulqueeny. Thanks very much to Sarah Marshall for spotting Emma’s cry for help and asking us to get involved.
I’m proud. The picture above is of a lovely thing Tessy Britton has sent me – the gift of a book. She asked 28 people (including me) to write about their experiments in community. My chapter is on Social Media Surgeries. The combined result is a wonderful book:
Tessy writes:
Largely (but not exclusively) these projects by-pass existing ‘systems’. They start with little or no money and ask for no permissions….Small they may be, but they represent the seeds of an emergent culture which I believe is going to spread, so potent is the glow created from the human interactions these projects generate.
The surgeries are spreading. As I write this I’m on the train to London, to speak at Open Tech (another great example of community culture stuffed full or people working on “stuff” that matters) about them. Rootling around in the back end of www.socialmediasurgery.com I find (and this site doesn’t record it all) that:
They are running in
We launched the site in July.
These people belong to something that David Barrie describes in his chapter in the book as the Thirteenth Tribe of community life – “Militant Optimists”:
One thing that makes life worth living is … people who are committed to improving society, prepared to organize and give it a go.
Hand Made: portraits of emergent new community can be bought from blurb.
The authors are:
David Gauntlett
Megan Deal and Friends
David Barrie
Rob Hopkins
Jerry Stein
Nick Booth
Jack Ricchiuto
June Holley
Ryan LeCluyse
Tracey Todhunter
Jack Forinash and Friends
Julian Dobson
Tom Andrews
Hannah Bullock and Tim Smit
Sarah Drummond and Friends
Andy Gibson
David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young
Peter Sergeant
Caroline Woolard and Friends
Louise Macdonald and David Key
Anab Jain and Chris Hand
Lloyd Davis
Dougald Hine
Edmund Colville and Friends
Matthias Regan and Friends
Chris Kennedy and Kate Cahill
Cassie Robinson
Tessy Britton