How the Warwickshire iPhone App will lead to open data

In an exciting, albeit slightly unexpected move, Apple cleared the Warwickshire iPhone application for download from iTunes on Christmas Eve. As such my planned multimedia blitzkrieg to publicise the launch was completely stuffed.

Now that everyone is back at work we have started to promote this new approach to our staff and citizens through our web site (www.warwickshire.gov.uk/iphone) and via a twitter account (www.twitter.com/wcciphone), there will also be more traditional internal communications and press releases being sent out. The app itself can be downloaded for free from http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/warwickshire/id345904759?mt=8

Although the focus of this project has bee the actual iPhone app, the real point behind this work has been to act as a stimulus for starting to provide data in open formats and in a universal manner. To this end we have been using a series of RSS feeds and XML web services to expose information on a subset of WCC’s information and services.

Now that this model is in place there are two key aims in the short term:

1. Expose more information so that we can feed a greater variety of services to the iPhone application and hopefully provide some richer functions.
2. Establish a set of standards for exposing data from WCC and establish an open data web presence for the authority – enabling anyone who is interested to make use of our data for their own analysis, applications or web sites.

This project is underway and I hope to have something visible to the public around the end of February. Priority areas for opening up data are going to be around geographical and democratic info. Despite these initial priorities, we are keen to hear from anyone who has other ideas on the type of information that should be made available.

WCC iPhone application now with beta testers

Today, we’ve sent out the beta version of our WCC iphone application to the lucky people who will be kicking its virtual tyres for us. If this goes well, hopefully it will be appearing on the iTunes app store in the near future.

As well as providing Warwickshire citizens with a new and different way to keep up to date with the authority and find out how to access public services, the application is also helping to prove a number of strategic concepts that we want to embed into our ICT architecture at the council.

1. The benefits of using web services: All of the information presented on the phone is driven by our RSS feeds or a new set of XML web services. These will update the phone application dynamically with no lag or delay. We intend to re-use the exact same services for developing other web applications or applications for other mobile platforms – reducing duplication, cost and delays while increasing accuracy and efficiency. This will hopefully be the genesis of an API for the authority’s data and services.

2. Context specific services: While we have grander aims regarding contextual access to our services based on a variety of factors, the iphone application gets the ball rolling by presenting information in a geographically aware manner. A user can see how far they are from a specific service and then get directions to it from their current location.

3. Taking advantage of platform specific benefits: As well as the location based services that the mobile platform provides, we can also make phone calls directly from the application to a particular service.

4. Using cloud based/utility infrastructure: The back end system providing the XML services is hosted on the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, entirely independant of the WCC network. Working this way is allowing us to evaluate the cloud computing model and to understand the governance and constraints that must be managed to gain the benefits of working this way while minimising the potential risks.

These concepts have also been the focus of R&D projects as documented on our wiki at: http://abigbang.wikidot.com/

Finally, here are some screen shots to give you a quick idea of the application in action…

Infrastructure R&D Update

The current Research & Development phase is nearly over. In the last couple of weeks the following projects have been worked on by Winston, Sukhpal and Tim:

Lifecycle Management
This project focused on the lifecycle within ICT and how the infrastructure needs to be provisioned in order to support the stages identified.
Link to wiki page

Infrastructure API and Provisioning Resources
This project was concerned with the provisioning of infrastructure resources through an API driven by a manual or programmatic event.
Link to wiki page

Elastic Application Platform
This project investigated how the infrastructure would provide a platform in support of an application with an associated service level agreement.
Link to wiki page

What Next?
With Identity and Infrastructure conceptual R&D coming to an end planning needs to be completed for the next phase, Architecture.

A reminder of the R&D Phases.

1. Conceptual: researching and testing the assumptions and concepts that our strategic vision is based on. For example in the sphere of applications our concepts include service orientation, business process focus and contextual access.

2. Architectural: understanding the logical building blocks that we will need in order to realise the concepts.

3. Technical: identifying the products and technologies that can best fulfil the roles defined by the architecture, taking constraints (historical, commercial etc) into account.

Work to date
For links to all the work carried out to date follow this link.

The next infrastructure R&D project

So far we have been looking into the concept of cloud computing, both public and private, and how this approach supports the development of service based applications (service oriented architecture approach).

Both public and private clouds present their services through an application programming interface (API) which can be used by developers to provision and configure the required infrastructure resources.  One of the main issues that has been discussed is that of vendor lock-in, where use of unique cloud API ties the consumer into the cloud service provider.

To address this we will research not only the use of an API to configure the infrastructure but the technique of brokering the cloud provider API through a common framework.

This time Tim, Winston and Sukhpal will work together.

Project – (find the Wiki Page here)

• The first part of the project will demonstrate how an infrastructure can be configured to create an elastic cloud infrastructure using the API.  This will involve setting up Amazon EC2 servers and configuring them through the API to scale in line with demand.
  
• The second part of the project will look at (and hopefully demonstrate) how a broker can be used to control the hosted infrastructure by linking with the providers API.

Second Round of R&D Projects

Having completed the first phase of R&D – See here for Wiki updates – the next round of projects have been issued.

Andy McGarry is looking at limiting access to services depending on identity.

Tim West is enjoying a couple of weeks leave.

Sukhpal Shergill Back from a week in sunny England to investigate the concept of cloud based infrastructure.

Winston Castle is getting to grips with web services and storage in the clouds.

Terry Rich Whitehead is investigating Altering the presentation of a service based on identity.

Steve Woodward was lucky enough to be here this time, and chose an envelope that contained a project on physical context as part of identity.

All of this work will be documented on our wiki at http://abigbang.wikidot.com/ – and will be added to over the next 8 weeks.

First round of New R&D projects

As promised we have kicked off the new R&D work today an a glittering showbiz style carnival of song and dance.

The initial projects that each of the team are having a crack at are:

Andy McGarry is looking at using mobile devices as possible factors of authentication.

Tim West is scratching his head as he considers how to provision cloud based infrastructure and services.

Sukhpal Shergill is wrestling with the thorny issue of testing scalable infrastructure.

Winston Castle is manfully getting to grips with setting up a web services management dashboard.

Terry Rich Whitehead is absolutely delighted to be investigating open standards for identity and authentication.

…and finally, because he failed to turn up today, Steve Woodward will be doing some initial investigation into claims based identity – which will be news to him.

All of this work will be documented on our wiki at http://abigbang.wikidot.com/ – well it will be as soon as I work out why I am keep getting an error message while I try to sort things out..

New R&D Work Starting Next Week

After the roaring success of the conceptual applications R&D work (street parades, honours from the palace etc), the powers that be have granted us licence to look at two more key areas that will form part of our ICT architecture.

Firstly, the Infrastructure work will be concentrating on how the traditionally physical elements of computing (storage, processing, connectivity) will be affected by the changes that the world of ICT is currently experiencing. This is likely to focus on the idea of ICT as a utility rather than a physical service, which, I am afraid means that the dreaded C-word is going to get thrown around quite a lot – yes, “Cloud”. Probably be some very bad puns as well. I can only apologise.

Secondly we will also be looking at the question of Identity, this is an area in which we will all see a lot of changes in the coming years. Currently identity is dealt with on a case by case basis in the world of ICT. For every system, web site or company that you deal with the chances are that you have at least one ID and password to remember. As the number of systems that you deal with grows, this is quickly going to become a real problem.

So we want to understand how we can simplify our identity model in order to provide a more straightforward way of handling your various digital roles, while also using these new ways of working to make applications more specific to each individual. This will make our applications more useful, relevant and secure. The aim is to work with existing standards and frameworks, rather than re-inventing the wheel. So, it looks like in addition to the dreaded C-word, the term “Metasystem” could well be cropping up now and again. Apologies once more.

As previously we have a crack team of ICT staff ready to start on a series of projects to test out these concepts. All the outcomes will be documented on our wiki, as well as all sort of exciting updates on this site.

New Case Study On An Innovative Use Of Twitter At WCC

We’ve just published a new case study on our wiki on how our IT Procurement team has used twitter to improve the service they provide.

The full report, prepared by Clare Woodhead who runs the New Ways Of Working Support Team (a team with almost as many syllables as staff) can be read here:

http://abigbang.wikidot.com/using-twitter-to-improve-the-pc-rollout-scheme

In a nutshell, for very little technical effort and no expenditure, a team was able to improve the accuracy and quality of the service that they provide to their customers.

We will have more case studies coming soon – we’ve even set up a new page here to provide an overview.

How ICT Strategy is changing the way that WCC works – with mentions for Twitter, YouTube, Ning, Facebook and the iPhone

It has been a fairly hectic (ie plenty of shouting and throwing things around) couple of months for James and I.

We have started to use the evidence we gained from the applications conceptual R&D work to further our ideas about building a service based architecture for the council, to help deliver all of the clever and futuristic technologies that our citizens will want and need in the coming years.

We’ve also got around to finally making a sign for the office door.

The momentum that the strategic approach has gathered has been helped in no small part by the increasing number of news stories and press releases detailing how the major IT suppliers are now trying to flog us all a Utopian cloud-based approach to personal and enterprise computing.

Added to this there are more examples everyday of how organisations are starting to take advantage of new ways of working via the cloud, web based applications, social networking tools and web services.

Our approach is still to do further R&D to define our architecture and then identify the technologies that we want to employ. However this is going to take us a little while. So in order to keep things moving along we have begun working with interested parties in the council to develop some new and innovative services using the concepts, methods and technologies which we want to introduce.

As these services develop and expand we will be producing more updates, our intent is that these pieces of work will provide us with experience and information to help construct the architecture. However we would also expect that if successful these examples will introduce some major changes in how WCC works, both with the public and internally.

Making use of Twitter

After quite a lot of discussion we will be looking at making use of Twitter in  a couple of ways – firstly as an additional channel for distributing WCC news. We will be interested in whether this is an effective idea and if so how to make best use of it. Also in exciting and breaking news it seems we will be starting to get our Councillors providing twitter updates. More news soon.

WCC on YouTube

Our news and media staff have launched a YouTube channel for the WCC. Strategically we believe that there is no point re-inventing the wheel for the distribution of content such as video – although there may be interesting challenges in terms of how we integrate content in such external stores as part of our overall content estate.

iPhone Application

The near-legendary WCC iPhone application is nearing completion. This is a project that will combine a number of the concepts we want to demonstrate while also providing a foundation for developing similar applications for other popular mobile platforms such as Android and Blackberry

The Future of Warwickshire Libraries

We have started to work with the forward thinking management of our libraries service to understand how they can best make use of emerging standards and technologies to provide innovative methods of delivering both traditional library services and also take advantage of social media to explore new types of services for their members. Platforms such as Facebook, Netvibes and Twitter will all be under consideration.

Social Networking and WCC communications

In addition to testing out twitter our news team has also set up a Netvibes page collating Warwickshire related news and information, you can check it out at: http://www.netvibes.com/wccmedia – this helps to show that there is already a wealth of information available via web service feeds.

Collaborative  working for local communities

In order to rapidly provide a platform to enable the work of WCC’s community forums we have adopted the use of the Ning platform to create a social networking platform specifically for this purpose. This was set up by our e-communications team and is now live for all citizens to get involved with. You can visit it here and set up an ID if you want to contribute: http://warwickshirelocalities.ning.com/.

An API for WCC

As part of the iPhone project we are starting to develop an Application Programming Interface for WCC information – so that developers have open and standard methods for interacting with the organisation’s information and services. This is an absolutely key strut of our strategic approach, although the information that will be available initially will be very simple we will no doubt learn some valuable lessons in how such an interface should be constructed, maintained and governed.

Exploiting Cloud/Utility Computing

We are starting to investigate the usage of cloud services for providing live services – in particular the Amazon products for rapidly providing flexible and scalable computing power and electronic storage. More news on this soon.

Microsoft Office 2010 and Word, Excel, PowerPoint & OneNote Online

Office 2010

Microsoft has today announced more information about Office 2010 – previously codenamed Office 14 – and the web based equivelants.

The announcement highlights that all applications within the suite now have ‘virtually’ the same user interface, that is  the office ribbon now being present in all applications, some added functionality and further details about the long anticipated Office Web Applications.

Changes to the Ribbon include improved customisation options and a change to the round Windows “Office Button” which lives at the top left of the Ribbon in all applications, now a rectangular one, apparently to help users locate it. A more simple layout with separator bars replacing borders and some newly designed icons.

A useful addition worth noting – in my opinion at least – is the ability to edit images within MS Office rather than using another application, often resorting to MS Paint to edit images, which until the Windows 7 update  was very basic.

I think it is safe to say – at least here in the office – we have been eagerly awaiting more information about the Microsoft Office web applications. The web site refers to the suite of web applications as ‘companions’ to the Office Suite and mentions the use of basic editing functions. Unfortunately this doesn’t really provide us with the detail we had hoped for, at least there is confirmation of on-line, simultaneous collaboration on documents with support across multiple device types and browsers (will be intereting to see how this works, possibly with the use of Sharepoint 2010).

So how will users access these services? Well there are three options available:

1. Through Windows Live – at no cost
2. On-premises – Office volume licensing customers
3. Microsoft On-line Services – subscription based (hosted)

Unfortunately there is no opportunity for us to try Office 2010 yet (web or local versions) so we have to make do with the videos.  To view the videos and find out more information visit the official Microsoft Technical Preview site - http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/

Microsoft expects to ship the final version of Office 2010 in the first half of 2010.