I’ve read through Gavin Bell’s slides from his BarCamp London 2 presentation “Time, History and the Internet” a couple of times now, and they’ve certainly provided food for thought. Gavin’s asking questions about how we describe and search for content based on both its own time of origin, but also the events to which it refers.

His references to documentation around the current war in Iraq are probably easiest to digest, how do we distinguish between reporting from 2002, reporting about 2002, and information from 2002 that has only come to light in 2006 or 2007? How do we show the build up of information, the layering of understanding, in a now-centered internet culture.

It’s a complex topic, and while necessarily a little abstract, it also has very real consequences for how we understand the world. I’ve several times written over on my non-tech blog, about how as a conflict looms in Iran that is based on the same mesh of weak arguments and over-stated intelligence reports that led us into Iraq, we need a better collective memory of the west’s relationship with that country.

The hundreds of feeds in my newsreader go a long way to present me with perspectives on each new development, and some of those stories offer some historical context nestled in their copy. But if I wanted to track the implications of Operation Ajax (nothing to do with xmlhttprequest, and considerably more sinister) over the past fifty years, I’d have my work cut out for me.

It’s a fascinating set of questions, and one we would do well to work through carefully. Answering them seems to be within reach, but it will push at the limits of all the modelling and visualising tools we currently have.

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This year’s midterm elections saw a huge range of online campaigning innovations. None of them was truly revolutionary, but from candidate profiles on facebook to coordinated text messaging campaigns and use of youtube, the emphasis on reaching out to voters online continues to grow. With all the worries about polling irregularities, projects like Polling Place Photo Project (via Zeldman) were also a nice addition to the toolkit.

So it’s especially surprising that it’s so hard to get good information on the results, particularly on the night. We were at the home of a local state senatorial candidate switching back and forth between the local public access TV and the NBC affiliate, and seeing huge discrepancies between the two. Typically the public access programming, was displaying more of the local results, but it was never clear whether their results only applied to the city or covered a broader audience and their windows-based system frequently froze.

When we looked online it was similarly hard to get up to date results, not to mention the difficulty of discerning between projections and actual reports. When we heard that a candidate had won or lost it was difficult to know whether that was the expectation or if the result was actually mathematically conclusive.

Surely it wouldn’t be hard for each State’s Board of Elections to publish the results online? Since they must have some way of gathering the results into electronic systems, tallying them in a simple table needn’t be much extra work and, as ever, if the structure is worked out properly (perhaps with a sprinkling of microformats) it would quickly become easy for enterprising developers to build RSS/email/SMS alert systems, map the data, and aggregate it all in a variety of ways.

For all the recent emphasis in government circles on RSS and podcasts, this is the sort of open data issue that is unlikely to easily gain traction. Perhaps this is one of the ways that newspapers can make use of structured data, providing us with the underlying data before they overlay their own commentary?

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Personal Kyoto (via O’Reilly Radar) is a great idea. The site allows residents of New York to register their electricity accounts, and see the change in usage that’s required for them to do their part to meet the targets set in the Kyoto Protocol.

While the protocol itself does not go nearly far enough to have a serious impact on climate change, it is good to see so many communities and individuals in the US reacting to the government’s failure to act by taking the initiative. Tools that help people see the impact they are having, coupled with ideas of how to improve that, are vital.

What’s particularly interesting to me in this example is the fact that the tool is only provided for New Yorkers. Personally, I’d love to have it work for Grand Rapids too, but the limitation is probably a very good thing. Sites like my footprint and others that help people work out their ‘ecological footprint’ try to get some context-based information but rely on large generalisations for most of their calculations.

By building a set of tools focussed on specific regions it’s possible to reduce the generalisations and to connect in with actions and responses that are appropriate for the lives of the people using the tools.

Eyebeam/Openlab, the developers of the system, state that they’re looking to partner with developers who want to bring Personal Kyoto to their town. I wish I had time to volunteer. Hopefully someone else locally does?

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For some time now I’ve been interested in the possibility of bringing together political information from all different layers of government and finding ways of layering it. Too few of us understand where the key decisions on the issues that concern or affect us are taken. Action at a local level can be a very powerful political tool it’s hard to find out which level is most appropriate, or to trace how issues move between layers. Unfortunately it can seem even harder to find well-structured data at more local levels than it is on a national level.

That’s why I was very interested to discover Civic Footprint, a project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology that provides a simple web interface (and since May 2006 an API) for residents of Cook County, Illinois to find out the ‘political geography’ of their address.

For users of the website those districts are matched up with representatives, so you can quickly find out who represents you on each level, and from there jump off to that representative’s website or wikipedia entry, or a Google News or Technorati search for them. It’d be nice if the congressional pages (such as this for Danny Davis (D)) were integrated with a site like govtrack for more targetted information that google or technorati can provide, but it’s still a great source of information.

It doesn’t look like the API will yet tell you who the representatives are for each of your districts, simply providing the IDs of those districts. Hopefully it will soon. It’ll be very interesting to see how the site develops, as it shows potential to become something of an example of how civic and political data can be made accessible and how services can be built on top of that.

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The good people at mySociety have been discussing the API they’ve opened up for They Work For You. They also have a few examples of how the API might be applied.

Best of them, and possibly the best API demo I’ve seen, is a text adventure run over telnet. Entering a UK postcode will select an MP for you, and you have to guide that MP to Tony Blair’s Sedgefield constituency, doing battle with any opposing MPs you pass along the way, and eventually fight the PM himself.

Entering my parents’ Tunbridge Wells postcode unfortunately selects me a Conservative MP, but in the spirit of role-playing I guided him to Sedgefield and defeated Mr. Blair. Greg Clark MP’s verbal diarrhoea skills are not to be trifled with, and he picked up 3246 Experience Points along the way. Very entertaining.

Read more about ‘Battle your way to Sedgefield’ here, and try your hand here (or here if you really want to avoid telnet).

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