Open Data

Scraping goes off the rails

The art of scraping websites is one beset by difficulties, as I was reminded this week when re-testing a scraper that I built recently. Railway performance As part of my participation in 100 Days of Code I’ve been working

Digging down into Local Data – Openly Local, Democratic Dashboard and more

Have you seen Democratic Dashboard? You really should take a look. This site, set up by the Democratic Audit based in the LSE, has one simple aim: ” … to promote engagement in the electoral process by making an array

CodeTheCity 3 – A reflection

Day 1 On a sunny but cool Saturday in February, almost thirty people from as far afield as Edinburgh converged on the Meston Building at Aberdeen University to collaborate on some as-yet-undefined hacks of public services. They came from local

A Scotland-wide FOI search facility?

Updated (*) 17/1014 2 new bullet points at the end. At the first Code The City event, held in Aberdeen in June 2014, one of the projects which was worked on for the weekend was the setting up of a

What next for CodeTheCity?

We kicked off CodeTheCity with our first Aberdeen event on 21st – 22nd June 2014 which really couldn’t have been better. We had some 38 volunteers – service users, service owners, coders, designers, bloggers – all of whom turned up

MatchTheCity Project at CodeTheCity

A quick update from Code The City. I’m working with the #MatchTheCity project team. Our aim is to provide some of the data and infrastructure to support other projects – such as #BigSociety. I’ve been working with Dave Morrison, the

Scraping Tools – A quick round-up

I’ve written here before about using Scraperwiki to scrape content from websites which haven’t implemented OpenData. I have even used Scraper Wiki to scrape our own website to get badly-formed content out in a structured way for a hack. Now,

Code For Europe (Scotland)

As I wrote in my previous post, Aberdeen City Council have joined Code for Europe 2014. Following the international meeting in Barcelona, and ahead of the appointment of the code fellows, the four participating Scottish councils came together in Edinburgh

Code for Europe comes to Aberdeen via Barcelona

Recently Aberdeen City Council has accepted an invitation (via NESTA) to join the Code for Europe movement. This post sets out some of the background to that. It covers the content and outcomes of the first meeting of code fellows

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