Harry Harrold of Neon Tribe had also spoken to me about some ideas he had for prototyping what an open data platform should look like. He came armed with a variety of hi-tech gadgetry: he had cardboard, scissors, paper, sticky-backed plastic……I was a little disappointed not to see any empty washing-up liquid bottles, but you can’t have everything.

My interest in the session was in answering the question of how to construct a platform for publishing and reusing open data that best supports the people using it. So, a system that both supports the people within organisations who need to publish data online and which also helps anybody who wants to make use of that data.

We spent the first hour discussing a variety of issues, whilst Harry started knocking up an idea of what a page on an open data platform might look like. We were lucky enough to have James Hendler with us who shared some of his experiences of helping to establish the US government’s Data.Gov site.

After the first hour we split into different groups.

I joined a group that was lead by Michelle Ide-Smith. She took us through describing different categories of users who might come to the site, why each of them might come to it and some scenarios describing how they might want to use it. Thanks to Douglas Guthrie for writing this up.

A Use Case Diagram for an OpenDataPlatform from #ukgc12

This was a really helpful way of looking at how a platform might be developed. It meant we spoke about how the prototype design that Harry had started could be amended and enhanced. It also meant that we started to consider the way it could help people to achieve their goals. The slideshow below shows the paper prototype that Harry developed.

Michael Grimes and I spoke about what the role of an organisation to stimulate some uses of the data it is publishing might be. We considered how to get people together to make use of data and how organisations might find out what people found useful.

We’d been talking about this just before the session wrapped up.

So, it was good to hear Tim talk about the 5 stars for open data engagement that he, Liz Stevenson, Anthony Zacharzewski, Jon Foster and Jag Goraya had drafted

* Be demand driven

* * Provide context

* * * Support conversation

* * * * Build capacity & skills

* * * * * Collaborate with the community

I could immediately see that some of the quite loose conversation that Michael and I had is being codified in there.

It made me think of the Help Me Investigate: Education evening that I’d attended with Joy Gibara from Birmingham’s Looked After Children Education Service last December. There Joy was able to share a load of information about sources of freely available data relating to education.

It was both the value that people got from Joy’s knowledge and the pleasure that she obviously gained from sharing it that I thought was really useful and interesting about that evening. We need to encourage people who work with data every day to explain it to interested people in ways like this.

And that idea gels nicely with Tim’s comments under three stars – “Support Conversation”

Are there easy ways to contact the individual ‘data owner’ in your organisation to ask them questions about the data, or to get them to join the conversation? Are there offline opportunities to have conversations that involve your data?

I think we ended with a consensus around the table that public sector organisations are going to need platforms for publishing open data that are more than just websites for hosting datasets. And I think that after the afternoon’s work most of us came away with some ideas about what such a platform might consist of.

Thanks to everybody who came to the session.

The session was based around the We Live Here work they are doing at the moment on the Creative Councils programme funded by Nesta. We were asked to look at the ways that neighbourhoods can be viewed as networks of networks and especially how characterising them in this way can refresh democratic engagement.

So, not lacking in ambition then.

A lot of the discussion centred around the practicalities of engagement. A number of people, such as Tom Phillips, David Newman from the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford  and Alison Cotterill from the Home Office had some interesting observations from their own experiences. At one point we moved quite seamlessly (or so it appeared) from talking about kids kicking footballs over people’s back fences in Kent to petrol bomb fights in Belfast.

We were also joined by Councillor Ian Sherwood who explained why he felt local politicians were sometimes reluctant to talk to people online. He said they were often afraid of making an unguarded comment that was then blown out of proportion by journalists. I can certainly imagine that politicians will be followed online by journalists waiting for just such an eventuality and we’ve seen the instance recently with Ed Milliband where a typo/autocorrect snafu has lead to wide and somewhat perplexing coverage.

Additionally, politicians make themselves more available when they enter the social web. This does make them more accountable and can give them new methods of consulting their constituents. It can also leave them at the mercy of obsessive characters pursuing single issues. I made the point that as online conversations are ones with an audience a skilled politician who deals reasonably with somebody like this will not satisfy the individual but will probably gain respect from people observing the conversation. It must still act as a barrier to some people joining in the first place though.

Using the network of networks idea a number of places have been mapped for their civic engagement nodes and links. This hasn’t been a solely online exercise and Catherine described walking round the streets of an area to better understand the different parts of its civic society. Some networks were described as looking like a game of pick-up-sticks while others like an entangled ball of wool or string.

Anthony and Catherine argued that understanding how networks interact with each other ought to lead to increased participation in local democracy. Catherine has made the case here that “we also need new structures for democratic engagement” and that theme was pursued on Saturday.

The immediacy of online communications and the ease of finding and talking to people raises an expectation that we can therefore extend our own influence with politicians and officials. However, our politicians and officials recognise and assess the amount of effort we might have made in contacting them and will respond accordingly.

This is why it’s probably still worth writing a letter, in ink, to your MP, because they will give it more weight than a Tweet or a copied-and-pasted campaign email. Unless the ink’s green, that is.

The project has created a prototype site that tries to start mapping online civic engagement in an area. When Anthony brought it up it struck me that it was quite similar to the B13 website that a number of us in Birmingham set up. this aggregates news, events, blog posts written in or about the area onto one site.

I’ve also helped to set up the We Love Balsall Heath website recently and one thing I’m keen to do on there is to see how pulling together different pieces of data about the area can help to understand it better and also to campaign for changes.

Some of the questions I came away from the session with were:

• How can understanding the network of networks that exist in an area help us to connect people and organisations together so their voices are more easily heard by people in positions of power?
• How might doing this also increase their ability to do things for themselves?
• How much does the ease of connecting and doing things online spill out into offline?
• How do we use a mixture of social web, open data and old fashioned on-the-ground civic activism to have meaningful and mature conversations with elected members and officials?

So, a stimulating discussion, only a fraction of which I’ve discussed, and an interesting project worth following. Thanks to everybody who attended it and apologies to those whose contributions I’ve overlooked.

I joined Digital Birmingham a little under four years ago from Aston Pride. There I’d been community wireless network manager in charge of technical delivery for the Computers in the Home project.

I’ve really enjoyed my job over the past few years. It’s been a busy time. For a small team we try and cover a lot of work and I wish my soon-to-be-erstwhile colleagues all the best for the future.

In the past few years I’ve spent a fair bit of time working in and around social media. In particular, I’ve had a great time helping to establish and run HyperWM, the unconference for local government in the West Midlands and Brewcamp, it’s smaller, more regular equivalent. I’m definitely going to continue working on these two events.

On the open data side Digital Birmingham ran hack events through Dave Harte‘s Birmingham Open City project and then some with ScraperWiki and Random Hacks of Kindness. This lead to me successfully bidding for funding for Nesta money under their Make It Local programme.

This was a joint application between Digital Birmingham and Mudlark and it lead to the development of the Birmingham Civic Dashboard. The Civic Dashboard receives a report of requests that come in from members of the public for services from Birmingham City Council each day. It then produces a number of visualisations of that data, such as showing them on a map.

It’s also the first open data web application to visualise local authority data in this way. We’re really proud of the results of the work we have done. It’s also a service that I imagine we will come to expect that local authorities provide to the public in the future.

Last year I put together Kindle Camp with Simon Gray and Kate Cooper. It was a day long workshop that took people through the process of publishing to the Kindle and included other e-publishing standards. I also attended the WAGHack that Linda Ellis put on over at The Public.

Those events, plus things such as sitting on the ICT Steering group at the new Library of Birmingham and speaking at the recent Hello Culture conference have sparked my interest in getting involved in creative digital projects in the future.

So, I’ll be looking for projects, big and small, that include social web technologies, open data and digitally creative work. I’ll be blogging about such topics on this site over the next few months to give a flavour of what I hope to be doing.

getgood

(Nicky Getgood)

I've just seen a supposed young 'rioter' sucking his thumb. It's the saddest fucking thing I've ever seen. :'-( #birminghamriots

On 9-8-2011 19:55:58 from TweetDeck

So, while the BBC choose to take reports from somebody apparently really here for the cricket, who plays up the drama and excitement they clearly feel for the situation, my friend is quietly reflecting on just one of the small tragedies that are being played out on our streets tonight. This really annoyed me.

Quite a few people picked up on just what a poor report this was and, suitably emboldened, I made the following complaint through the BBC website

Some time a little after 9 tonight the BBC News went to a Tim Hart, who was described as a freelance journalist.

He quite evidently didn’t know Birmingham, proceeding to get the names of more streets wrong than he did right. He also claimed that there had been no buses running from the city centre since 3pm, something contradicted by many people locally.

On my way home from work at 5pm this evening I saw a number of buses coming from the city centre. A city centre that wasn’t on some kind of lock down, as this reporter suggested.

The report was delivered in a breathless fashion and the reporter seemed somewhat hysterical about what he had seen.

At a time when people feel worried about what is happening in their city it would be nice if the BBC was a bit more selective about who it chooses to report on its behalf.

We do have some very fine journalists in Birmingham. Many Brummies, this one included, would have appreciated it if you had used one of them.

According to the BBC website, I’ll have a response in ten days.

It’s well worth subscribing to. My favourite recent post had a link to the video below which demonstrates the Bubble Sort algorithm by means of Hungarian Folk Dance.

This was created at Sapientia University in Tirgu Mures (Marosvásárhely), Romania. They have their own YouTube channel as well as Facebook page. And really, what’s not to like?

Which was nice.

The entrance doors to Kirkconnel Parish Church

© Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

But is this the only reason why 2011 is an interesting number? Hell, no. Here are a few more of the qualities that 2011 possesses.

1. It is a prime number, n such that 2n-1 is also prime. So if you double 2011 and take one away you get 4021, which is also a prime number. The last time this happened was in 1867.
2. It is a toothpick prime. Toothpick numbers are created by imagining that you are putting toothpicks on a table according to certain rules. Here is a really good simulation of toothpick sequences, they display some lovely symmetries and look a bit fractally at times. 1871 was the last year that was a toothpick prime. The next one will be in 2731.
3. It is a number that eventually reaches 1 under “x -> sum of cubes of digits of x”. So, you cube each of the digits of a number and add them together, then repeat with the result you obtain. Now, most numbers immediately start to increase quite dramatically under this rule, but 2011 becomes 2^3 + 0 + 1 + 1 = 8+1+1 = 10 and 10 becomes 1. The last year this was true was 1981 and it won’t happen again until 2101
4. It is a prime, p such that p+1 is divisible by each digit in p. So, if you add 1 to 2011 you get 2012 which is divisible by 0,1 and 2. Now, this doesn’t look too special at first, but although it last happened in 2003 it won’t be true again until 2063. So, savour it while you can

And there are loads more qualities that 2011 has. If you’ve made it this far down then you probably won’t be surprised that you can find an interesting quality or two about nearly any number. In order to find the four above I searched the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences, where 2011 is listed in 401 different sequences. In fact, you have to get to the number 11630 until you reach a number not listed in any sequence.

So, does this mean that we will have to wait until the year 11630 to have an uninteresting number?

Well no, because mathematicians have found a nice little paradox. The Interesting Number Paradox to be precise, which states that all numbers are interesting. Even if they aren’t.

It runs like this. You can define what is interesting or uninteresting however you like. Once you have done this you have a set of interesting numbers and a set of uninteresting numbers. In the uninteresting set there is one number which is the lowest value. Hey presto, you’ve just found something interesting about it!

Now, bung that number in the interesting set and go back to the uninteresting set. There’s a new value which is now interesting by virtue of being the lowest uninteresting number. And in this way you can move up through the uninteresting number set until all of them are interesting.

So, every new year we should expect to have have a round of Tweets expressing at least one wonderful property of the year’s value. I for one look forward to that.

A friend texted me today and asked what the chances are of a group of seven people picking names in their office Secret Santa without anybody choosing themselves. A clean draw, so to speak.

Now, there are a number of ways that you can try and work this out, but I think the easiest to follow is by thinking of the problem in terms of the number of permutations of the possible outcomes.

In my friend’s office, the first person to draw a name out has 7 possible names to choose from, then the second person has six names, the third person has five names and so on.

This means that the total number of possible permutations is 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1, which is also written as 7! and is known as the factorial of 7.

7! = 5040

Then, we need to find the number of permutations where 1 is not in the first position, 2 is not in the second position, and so on.

And, quite frankly, this is a bugger to work out.

One of the reasons for this is the way the probabilities shake out. If person #1 picks out person #2′s name then there are two situations that exist where a solution is still possible.

1. Person #2 picks out person #1.
2. Person #2 picks out a name from Person #3 – Person #7

In the first case Persons #1 and #2 are buying each other presents and create a closed circle. We are therefore left with the probability of the remaining 5 people not picking each other to be exactly the same as if they had started as just the 5 of them in the first instance.

In the second case, and I’ve burned a few brain cells trying to follow why this is, then we are left with the probability being the same as if the Secret Santa had started with 6 people in it. I think.

Appropriately enough, this is known as a derangement and it leads to the following equation, where !n is the number of derangements for a set of size n.

!n = (n-1)[(!(n-1) + !(n-2) ]

Great, as if this seemingly simple question hadn’t turned out to be difficult enough we are now left with a recurrence equation – this is one when the answer is expressed in terms of preceding answers of a  sequence.

So, if we substitute for n=7 then we get

!7 = 6(!6 +!5)

Skipping somerather nifty and clever stuff, we get

!7 = 1854

Which means that we are close to finding out the answer to the question. Out of 5040 possible permutations of Secret Santas there are 1854 that do not include anybody picking their own name. So the probability of a clean draw is 1854/5040 which is *drum roll* . . . . .

0.36786

In fact, once you have 7 people in your Secret Santa the probability of a clean draw will always be equal to this. Which means that just over one in every three draws will be a clean one.

I think this is why we used an online Secret Santa app this year. It stops us from having to think too hard about it.

A view of the Maramureş countryside, looking across from Breb to the Rooster's Crest (Creasta Cocoşului)

Maramureş is a county of Romania that lies within Transylvania and is in the North of the country near the border with the Ukraine. It consists of a series of river valleys and has, until now, largely resisted modern life and retained its rural traditions. It is common for both men and women to wear traditional dress and at this time of year most people are working in the fields, scything the meadows and raking up the grasses into the distinctive haystacks that scatter themselves across the undulating hills.

Change is coming: often too fast for many, such as Ramona, who loves the traditions, landscapes and architecture of the county. Hosts of young people from Maramureş have made the most of Romania’s accession to the EU and have travelled, largely to Italy and Spain, to work. As money comes back into the area the old traditional wooden homes are being replaced by new, larger and often quite garish houses.

Wooden House in Botiza

The traditional wooden churches, many of them designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites, are being supplanted in the villages by huge great churches. And it is something quite remarkable to come from Western Europe and see quite such a programme of new church building going on in the east.

For our accommodation we stopped mainly in local, independently run wooden guesthouses which sat in the same grounds as our hosts homes. Our first was Mr Pop’s house in Hoteni a village in the Iza valley. Mr Pop is in a Folk band and was touring with a theatre company and so we were looked after by his sister, Voichita and Haiduc, his dog.

Mr Pop's house

On our first day of walking we took a fairly leisurely stroll that took us in a circular route from one village to the next. First was Breb, which is one of the villages that William Blacker talks about in his book Along The Enchanted Way.  After Breb we left any idea of paths behind us and headed up the hill and across to Budeşti.

Because the Maramureşeans don’t put up fences or hedges around their fields then paths can be quite temporary affairs. Yes, you might sometimes follow relatively permanent tracks that have seen a horse and cart along them, but you can also find yourself walking along a way that barely seems to have existed until you chose it a few moments before.

This serendipitous wandering just about always leads us to our destination, eventually. The one exception was when we realized that the tracks we were following belonged to the manure cart and so we ended up not only in the wrong place but surrounded by smelly piles of shit as well. Fortunately, there are a lot of people around working in the fields and Ramona soon had instructions for a new route for us to follow.

Ramona makes a path

From Budeşti to Sarbi there isn’t much of a chance to go cross country and so even Ramona was forced to walk us along the road.  Having failed to hitch a ride with a horse and cart we were keen to leave the tarmac and so we popped into the village hatmaker’s house in Sarbi. Ramona wanted to say hello to his wife – the hatmaker died very suddenly last year and she was looking out for her a bit, I think.  His son came out with her and gave us some suitably vague instructions to get back to Hoteni.

The map above shows the two walks that we did while we were in Hoteni and includes some photos from them.

There is also a slideshow of the whole holiday that I’ve done, which includes photos from hitch-hiking a ride on a horse and cart, graves at the Merry Cemetery and the logging train from Viseu.

If you are interested in a tour of Maramureş then I can heartily recommend Ramona and her My Romania tour company. She’s an independent tour company that will run both set and tailor-made tours.

After writing about how many Panini stickers collectors should expect to buy to fill a book  I’ve had a fair few comments about it.  Greg Newman brought John Crace’s article in The Guardian to my attention where he talks about “the four-yearly great Panini conspiracy theory.”  The conspiracy being that Panini don’t distribute the stickers evenly, so you have to buy even more of them to complete your set.

As evidence, he cites Chris Taylor, whose “album is now about two-thirds full and I’ve already ended up with a whole load of Lee Young-Pyos, Hameur Bouazzas and Vince Grellas“.  He then compares the fact that he has never even seen a Thierre Henri, whereas  Chris has got six.  Which is an opening for swapsies if I ever heard one.

Anyway, what he described looked quite reasonable to me. After all, if you expect to have to buy 4505 stickers then you are going to get rather a lot of some players.  So, I decided to do a bit of mathematical modelling and wrote this little bit of Python to do it for me.

The code simulates somebody buying stickers by generating random numbers between 1 and 640, and it keeps on running until every number is picked once. It also keeps a count of how many of each sticker is bought.

When all of the stickers were bought and the album filled up I then went through and counted how many stickers had been opened just the once, how many were opened twice, three times, four times etc.

For good measure I then did it another nine times and took averages. It’s not a great sample but hey, it’ll do for the purposes of this explanation.

So, what were the result then? Well, here is the table I created

First of all, I was pleased that the average number of stickers that were bought was 4500.  Within just 10 iterations of the simulation this is already extremely close to the expected number of 4505 that Laurent et Julie corrected my earlier workings out to.  It is worth noting that the run with the fewest stickers bought was just 3306 while the most was over double that with 7244.

You can immediately see how even in a small group of friends one person could appear to be a lot luckier than the other.

Now look at the number of duplicates we get.  Even on the lowest number of duplicates out of the ten runs there were 2 players that were opened 14 times each.  And on the one run there was a player that was opened 23 times!!

Below is the averaged out graph of the 10 runs I did.

A Spread of Duplicates for the Coupon Collector problem where n=640

Which has a really interesting curve as, by the time the last sticker in the book is opened, there are duplicates for nearly every player. In fact, there are only 7 players that there aren’t swaps for.

The number of these multiples rises up to the 90 players that have 6 stickers opened and then it eventually tails off at the end where you have 20 stickers of the player who by now the poor collector must heartily hate the sight of.

And when you look at it like this you do see that the conspiracy theories are just the result of looking at the problem down the wrong end of the telescope. If anything, the examples that John writes about in the article aren’t as extreme as the ones created by the simulation.

I reckon he’s doing alright really.

There are 638 stickers to collect in total and it made me wonder how many stickers you would expect to have to buy so that you had a complete set. I was interested in how many you would need to buy without doing swapsies with anybody and on the premise that there were an equal number of each sticker and that they were randomly distributed.

Be warned, there’s some maths up ahead.

This sort of problem has been modelled as the Coupon Collector’s problem by mathematicians and I’ll walk gently through the explanation to get to the answer to the problem applied to the World Cup football stickers album.

Step 1 – Probability of getting a new sticker

Now, the first sticker you take is absolutely guaranteed to not be one you have already got. The second sticker has a 637 in 638 chance of being a new sticker. Once you have this second sticker then the probability of the next sticker being different to the first two is 636 in 638 and so on . .. . . . . .until you have all but one of the stickers in your album to fill. Then, you have a 1 in 638 chance of any sticker being that last one you want.

Step 2 – Number of stickers we expect to buy to get a new one

So, we know we can work out the probability of getting a new sticker at any point. But we don’t want to know the probability of each sticker we open being a new one. What we actually want to know is how many stickers we should expect to open each time to get a new one.

This is actually quite easy. If you know the probability, call it p, of an event happening, then the expected number of times you should have to do something to get the outcome you want is 1/p.

To make sense of this then think of throwing a die. If you want to throw a 6 then you know that you have a 1 in 6 chance of throwing one. It makes sense that you should expect, on average, to throw a die 6 times until you get a 6.

So, to get the total number of stickers you should expect to buy altogether then you just add up the number of stickers you expect to buy to get the first, the second, the third . . . . . .right through to the 638th sticker.

Still with it?

Step 3 – Adding it all up

Turning this into numbers, this means that we want to work this sum out

1 + 638/637 + 638/636 + . . . . . . 638/2 + 638/1

And that, my friends, is an harmonic series, so it is. And, to estimate the sum of an harmonic series, and skipping some of the maths, we can use the equation

S = n ln(n)

In the equation above, applied to our example, S is the total number of stickers we should expect to have to buy, n is 638, the number of unique stickers we want to get, and ln(n) is the natural log of n. So

S = 638 x ln(638)

S = 638 x 6.46

S = 4120

And so, unless you swap, then you should expect to have to buy 4120 stickers, at a total cost of £412, to fill your Panini sticker album.

Which all goes to show, that it is far better to be sociable than rich.