Steve Parks's blog
Reboot Britain: Life Case Study
Blogged by Steve Parks on Monday, 1 July 2010
Hugo is from Particple (http://www.participle.net), and is talking about a project called Life.
It's designed to help families in crisis. To develop the service they spent some time living with these families. They traced an 18 year history of engagement with council services for each family, discovering there had been no change in that period. They estimate a cost of about £250,000 per family. The time spent by authorities was 74% admin, 12% indirect support, and only 14% face to face with the family. >> READ MORE
Reboot Britain: Safeguarding 2.0 Case Study
Blogged by Steve Parks on Monday, 1 July 2010
Dominic is from FutureGov, a consultancy that tries to bring technology solutions to public sector problems.
He's talking about a project called Safeguarding2point0, and their website is http://www.safeguarding2point0.com.
The thesis: How can we draw on our knowledge of social tech, service design and local government to improve safeguarding children? >> READ MORE
Reboot Britain: ReSync case study
Blogged by Steve Parks on Monday, 1 July 2010
Sarah from ReSync is next on the platform at the Reboot Britain event, to give a case study of using digital innovation to improve public services.
The aim of the project is to deliver information, advice and guidance to young people are NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) - through an online mentoring service. The key is that it's a peer group service - so they train up young people to provide the service itself. >> READ MORE
Reboot Britian: Government as Platform
Blogged by Steve Parks on Monday, 1 July 2010
Emer Coleman is currently working with the Greater London Authority, and has been involved in the London Datastore project. She's the second speaker at the Reboot Britain conference, looking at how digital innovation can deliver better pubic services more cheaply.
She says that government today has been based on proprietary, closed systems, from expensive vendors. The move now is to open source, and open data. This is underpinning a complete change in government communication. >> READ MORE
Reboot Britain: MySociety
Blogged by Steve Parks on Monday, 1 July 2010
I'm at the Reboot Britain event in London, organised by NESTA. The aim of the event is to look at how digital innovation can help deliver better public services more cost efficiently.
Tom Steinberg is the first speaker. He's the founder of MySociety, which runs websites such as theyworkforyou.com, fixmystreet.com and more.
He says the key to digital innovation is its scalability. Fixmystreet was built for £6000 - and doesn't cost proportionately more, the more people use it. Whereas in traditional public services as demand grows, so does the cost. >> READ MORE
Drupalcon Keynote: Tim O'Reilly
Blogged by Steve Parks on Tuesday, 2 April 2010
Today's keynote speaker at Drupalcon in San Francisco is Tim O'Reilly, one of the most famous advocates of the Open Source movement. The UK Drupal community have gathered at Google's UK offices in London to watch a livestream of the speech...
Open Source and Open Data in the Age of the Cloud
Tim wants to get us to think about the meaning of open source and cloud computing, to prepare for the future.
"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet" - William Gibson >> READ MORE
TV Station Case Study, Jakub Suchy
Blogged by Steve Parks on Tuesday, 2 April 2010
Jakub's client, Prima TV, wanted to be able to manage many mini-sites from one Drupal installation. They wanted to use lots of multimedia, but it should be simple to use and integrate with the the existing show programming system.
Careful wireframing proved inavluable, with rapid prototyping of functional parts. Jakub shows us a sample wireframe, and they're very detailed.
He talked a little about how much time was spent on different elements of the project. 25% Planning, 30% Core development and then 10% on most other things - but 10% just on deployment! >> READ MORE
Hacked module, Steven Jones
Blogged by Steve Parks on Tuesday, 2 April 2010
Steven is going to give a presentation on a modules he wrote called 'Hacked' (http://drupal.org/project/hacked). It doesn't prevent your site being hacked, it simply monitors for code that has changed on your site. So this isn't 'hacks' in the security sense - more in the coding sense.
It highlights code that was changed in packaged releases, such as module updates, including in CVS checkouts. He designed it to be able to monitor if developers on the project have hacked core or contrib modules. This module then allows you to check when you revisit the site for any hacks. >> READ MORE
Drupal Performance, Stewart Robinson
Blogged by Steve Parks on Tuesday, 2 April 2010
We're back at Google's London offices for Day 2 of the DrupalVolCon - for members of the UK Drupal community who were unable to fly to San Francisco for the main Drupalcon because of the ash cloud. We've all had some beer and pizza, and are settling down for the first presentation by Stewart Robinson.
Stewart has been working over the last year on ways to scale drupal. He's going to share his tips and tricks. He'll show us a site he built yesterday, and compare running it on vanilla Drupal to running it on the Pressflow Drupal distribution. >> READ MORE
Drupalcon Keynote: Dries Buytaert
Blogged by Steve Parks on Monday, 1 April 2010
Today's keynote at Drupalcon San Francisco is presented by Dries Buytaert. Each conference he gives a 'State of Drupal' speech. This year he's also being watched on live video stream at various DrupalVolCon events around the world, by delegetes who were unable to get to the main conference because of the Volcano ash disrupting air travel.
Dries starts with a few memories - showing a picture of the university dorm that Drupal started in, and the first Drupalcon. >> READ MORE
