Young Rewired State: bringing back open government data

Young Rewired State was born back in 2009 when a small group of us decided that we needed to bring the open government data revolution to the next generations. Our intention was to show them what had been fought and won on their behalf for democracy and scrutiny, introduce them to the potential for open data, open government or otherwise, in a non-dull way.

Google hosted that first weekend for us but the legend now goes that it took us three months and a massive credit card bill for hotels and trains to find 50 coding kids in the whole of the UK for a single weekend hackathon at the much-lauded Google HQ in London. Our original sign-up was three kids… three… for a free weekend in Google HQ London.

Photo by Lettuce

We wanted to introduce coding kids to open government data, instead we discovered

• schools were not teaching programming, computer science, or anything really other than the PE/Geography/any spare teacher showing the kids how to turn on a computer and use Word/Excel/How to photoshop a kitten pic (the only nod to programming – some of you will get this)
• this was not something the teachers were happy about and I found acres of frustrated geeky teachers fighting a Latin Goliath
• young people were being driven to teaching themselves, something well-served online with a tonne of lessons on YouTube, websites with individual lessons in the greatest detail, should you care to look, but these kids were isolated and bullied
• some/many were being failed at school <- when I posted that blog post 25,000 people on Hacker News clicked on it within the first hour…

M’esteemed colleagues were well-renowned software engineers and designers and did not have the capacity to fight this particular fight, except by continuing to do good – most of whom are now in the UK Government Digital Service – but I was able enough, and I was a Mum and I was an entrepreneur, and I was an open government data campaigner – and I had to stay to do something.

Through personal and professional means I turned myself into a lobbying machine to teach our kids to code and, through Rewired State, continued to run Young Rewired State as an annual event, growing from 50 kids to 600 kids, now 1000.

I gave up my job.

I fought battles.

I lost battles.

I won them.

I did school runs.

I got cross about girl engineers (lack of).

I wrote.

I did.

I talked (although I am not a natural speaker – BetaBlockers FTW).

And I found a community of fabulous people: Mathematica, CodeClub, Mozilla, Nominet, Nesta, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Jam, MadLab, Birmingham City Council, CoderDojo, Treehouse, General Assembly – seriously so many people… and now I feel like I can step back from that fight now. I have been as much use as I can be… and a *lot* is happening.

I need to look to the future and I need to re-focus the kids we are now finding in increasing numbers, and as the others teach them how to code, and as the others fight the battle with institutions and education – I want to go back to what we wanted to do in the first place.

And so I think now is the time, as we grow beyond the UK, to re-focus what we are doing on finding these kids and introducing them to Open Government Data. I will always fight for education, but I fight for democracy, transparency and accountability over all – and I would like our children to grow up understanding Open Data as freely as they understand Open Source.

Starting now…

Our aim is to find and foster every child driven to teach themselves how to code – and introduce them to open government data

http://youngrewiredstate.org

Tell Gove what you think (the easy way)

When I was working in government, in the Cabinet Office and the Home Office, much discussion went on about how to make government consultations more available to everyone. Commentable format, that would be accepted, read and considered. In the digital world we were in, it was recognised that the consultation process needed to be changed to that everyone could have a democratic voice.

Well, the work continues on how to make that open, but we have a situation here that we just need to forget about fixing that  for the minute (make it my problem for how we formalise the responses in order to make sure your voices are heard officially,there will be a way) and take the JFDI route.

No, not the…

This one…

Michael Gove has opened his consultation on ICT in education, the one he referred to in his speech last week. His speech was very long and full of lots of information, some have accused it of not saying very much – but what he definitely said was that this consultation was coming, and that he ackowledged the problem. Which is a great start.

This is a very important consultation and opens a whole new door to open education and should not be ignored. But the consultation is in the formal format and requires you to answer specific questions, and not see what anyone else has said.

So, Craig Snowden @CraigSnowedIn, a 17 year old developer from Scotland who answered a twitter call to open the consultation, popped it into Google docs.

In Google docs you can read and comment, and see others’ comments, and properly understand what this might be saying.

Now, this is not the formal process, but there is no reason why the comments cannot be fed into the formal process and I will volunteer to do that. So if you fancy meandering over, having a read and saying what you think should be said, then go here. It is unbranded, it is not pretty, the formatting remains from the original. But it is a document, and you can comment as you wish, inline. (Just highlight the part you want to comment on, go to the ‘insert’ tab, scroll down to comment and Bob’s your Uncle).

The original and official consultation is here should you wish to formally respond directly.

Note: Closing Date: Wednesday 11 April 2012

If you have no idea what this is all about, here are a few blog posts that might help:

Year 8 is too late

Teach our kids to code e-petition

Paragraph Seven

Open Education – it’s not impossible, it is already here

The Guardian tech weekly podcast on tech skills and education

Lazy, layabout teens

My ICT teacher can’t mark my homework

My head teacher won’t let me teach computing

Open education and the freedom to teach computing

Open Government Data *wince* it’ll take a while… Open Education? Next September? No probs