Tom Szekeres

More experiments with Twitter visualisation, aided and abetted...

zakazaka — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:05:49 +0000

More experiments with Twitter visualisation, aided and abetted by tutorials over at OUseful.

If you fancy having a go yourself, a few quick steps…

Download and install R (also, get over the fact that the site was put together by a statistician)
Download, install and open RStudio
Type install.packages(“ggplot2”) into the console and press enter
Type whichever number is nearest to you and press enter - you just installed a package

Pretty much all the rest is covered over on OUseful (you just need to repeat step three for any other packages needed).

Quick ‘n’ dirty histogram of the #kanye hashtag on...

zakazaka — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:38:24 +0000

Quick ‘n’ dirty histogram of the #kanye hashtag on Twitter.

I’ve recently started dipping my toe into Social Network...

zakazaka — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:02:05 +0000

I’ve recently started dipping my toe into Social Network Analysis across this tutorial on starting out with open source graphing app Gephi - my first bash at graphing a social network since an ill-advised sixth form project called the “love web”…

This time round, what you can see is a rather more sober visualisation of my Facebook ego network (without the ego, and ignoring weak ties i.e. friends who don’t know any of my other friends).

In case it’s not obvious, the nodes are people, and the edges show friendships (in the Facebook sense); the layout is worked out by a force-based algorithm, and the colouring is from an automatic function to cluster by modularity (i.e. how closely knit a particular set of people are). What struck me was the ease with which I could work out what each colour meant - I don’t think I could have done a better job doing it by hand.

On the right hand side are people I’ve worked with - POKE on top, and Government underneath, the green bunch are mostly school friends, and the rest are mostly people I met while at University (or friends met through those people). Yellow from my course, blue were housemates, and the remainder my main social circle (red generally people I met before I spent a year in France, orange afterwards).

(via Suprageography | I see data, I make maps)

zakazaka — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:02:06 +0000

(via Suprageography | I see data, I make maps)

I downloaded the OpenPaths iPhone App shortly before heading off...

zakazaka — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:02:05 +0000

I downloaded the OpenPaths iPhone App shortly before heading off for an amazing week of skiing in the trois vallées in the French Alps, and put together this really simple little animation using their web interface showing five days of skiing (and our eight hour train journey back to London).

OP is the latest of many great ideas to come out of the NY Times R&D lab, and other than offering a personal locker for geolocation data, they intriguingly promise a platform allowing users to give access to this information to researchers, artists, and technologist. You can access your data via an API, download as JSON, KML or CSV, and connect up Foursquare (other Apps soon to follow).

"Knowledge is now the property of the network. The smartest person in the room is the room itself."

zakazaka — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:10:26 +0000

“Knowledge is now the property of the network. The smartest person in the room is the room itself.”

- David Weinberger in Too Big to Know

via Not So Fast | Think Quarterly by Google

Can’t believe this hadn’t come to my attention...

zakazaka — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:03:05 +0000

Can’t believe this hadn’t come to my attention before. Great idea.

via BrainPickings

What better way to kick off the new year than with words of wisdom from those who have threaded before us? That’s precisely the premise of advice to sink in slowly, a wonderful project enlisting design graduates in passing on advice and inspiration to first-year students through an ongoing series of posters — part Live Now, part Everything Is Going To Be OK, part Wisdom, part something completely refreshing, based on the idea that we all have subjective wisdom we wish we’d known earlier, but often don’t get a chance to pass it on to those who can benefit from it in a way that makes them pay heed.

You can also buy fundraising posters, 100% of the proceeds going to fund free posters for first years. Do it!

A talk by Nicholas Felton (he of Feltron Annual Report &...

zakazaka — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:00:05 +0000

A talk by Nicholas Felton (he of Feltron Annual Report & Facebook Timeline fame) entitled ~~Numerical~~ Narratives (recorded at Eyeo Festival 2011).

Incidentally, if you’re wondering when the 2011 Annual Report is out…

@inorganik if all goes well, it’ll be out by the end of the month.
— Nicholas Felton (@feltron) January 3, 2012

"These are particles with a will"

zakazaka — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:03:06 +0000

“These are particles with a will”

- Dirk Helbing on Pedestrians.

IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?

The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why.

Crowd dynamics: The wisdom of crowds | The Economist

The Size (reposted from faststream.hmg.gov.uk)

zakazaka — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:56:45 +0000

Before I joined Poke, I spent a couple of years in the UK Civil Service as one of the first few people to join via the Technology in Business Fast Stream, launched a few years ago to plug the (then widening) digital skills gap in Government. When I was asked by the Cabinet Office to write about some of my experiences last year, I put together the post below, which was published last May.

While I enjoyed the time I spent in Whitehall, and feel like we made a lot of progress in the short time I was at HMRC, there were a few of us who felt constrained by the technological limitations that come from working in the Public Sector (my main bugbear being having to use IE6…), and who have taken since swapped Whitehall for ~~Tech City~~ Silicon Roundabout.

The Fast Stream team have recently removed all posts by those of us who have recently moved on - they’ve made some positive first steps onto Facebook, but still don’t quite get the idea of blogging…

I’ve therefore reposted the article below (and added back in the links), which hopefully will be of use to those out there who are looking to apply to TiB.

How Big…?

One thing that hits you when you first start working in central government is the sheer scale of operations, particularly if you working for one of the larger Departments. The numbers at HMRC tell the story (up to a point): £435.1bn of tax collected, £39bn in benefits and tax credits paid out, 61 million calls handled via Contact Centres, three million visits to our Enquiry Centres, 9.9 million letters received (these numbers are for 2009/10).
How about our website? Towards the end of January when people file their tax return online, it becomes the third busiest in the world, beaten only by Facebook and Google. You don’t need much imagination to understand how integral ICT is to delivering these numbers, but it takes a surprising amount of creativity and ingenuity to understand how to meet the challenges we now face.

Change is a word you’ll hear a lot…

Although it sounds like a cliché, this is an unprecedented time for Government (and the technology that powers it). With public services set to be digital by default, the development of Government Cloud services (dubbed ‘G-Cloud’), and the enormous cost-savings that can be achieved by changing how HMG does business, Gov.uk will need a new generation of leaders who understand the transformative power of technology and who have the drive and influence to ensure it’s done the right way.

All of this may sound very exciting, but what does working in Gov IT actually look like day to day? How do our experiences on TiB match up? Speaking from my own perspective, it’s the sheer scale of the opportunities available (if you look for them) that make the Fast Stream so worthwhile.

What’s it really like?

Within a few months of starting I was supporting an IT rationalisation programme that will save £161m a year from 2011/12. As part of our Green IT team, I then helped deliver the largest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from any Government ICT estate – the equivalent of taking over 8,000 cars off the road – which contributed towards the commitment to reduce HMG’s Carbon Footprint by 10% in the space of 12 months. I’m now working with one of our suppliers on IT innovation, trying to capture, prioritise and implement the ideas that will save the next £100m, halve the number of letters we post, or decimate the time it takes to file online.

Around all of this, I’ve sat on the Government’s CIO Council Green Delivery Unit and helped to shape the Sustainable IT agenda across the public sector. I’ve facilitated a workshop for 50 senior leaders (think herding cats) following a major organisational restructure. I’ve written conference presentations delivered before hundreds of experts on Government ICT, taken part in a Round Table Discussion with Directors and Chief Executives, and written articles read by tens of thousands of people on the Department’s website.

A quick word of advice

If you are successful and join the Fast Stream (whichever flavour), learn to recognise opportunities and (more importantly) make sure to seize them. Put yourself out there and make sure you promote yourself both within your Department and beyond. Don’t be afraid to ask – the worst that can happen is you’ll be told “no”. Conversely always be willing to say “yes” – even if it leads down a harder path.

Any questions? Feel free to contact me either here or on twitter.

"UK consumers are more likely to access social networking sites on a mobile phone than other..."

zakazaka — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:31:05 +0000

“UK consumers are more likely to access social networking sites on a mobile phone than other countries, with 43 per cent of those with social networking site profiles saying they do so compared to just 30 per cent in the US.”

- From Ofcom’s International Communications Report 2011, up from 24% in 2010 (US was 22% last year).

Also of interest:

In the UK, twice as many people claim to have a Friends Reunited profile as a MySpace one (sorry Tom/Rupert)

Mobile access to Social Networks will likely overtake Desktop access in 2012 in the UK (but not Laptop access)

Really nice themed interview series by Interactive Things. In...

zakazaka — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:30:19 +0000

Really nice themed interview series by Interactive Things. In their own words:

We want to feel the pulse of the creative community working at the intersection of art, design, and science. They are restlessly weaving together the physical with the digital, turning data into meaning, and creating interactive experiences to generate inspiring insights that encourage us to challenge our own works.

How many times can one man say “unacceptable”?...

zakazaka — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:37:27 +0100

How many times can one man say “unacceptable”? :)

“Last Thursday, Chris Chant gave a talk at a cloud-computing event kindly hosted by the Institute for Government in London. Chris is an Executive Director in the Cabinet Office working as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative, and spoke about G-Cloud and what people can expect from it. For those who were unable to make the event, we recorded it and present it here.”

"They fear disruption far more than they do destruction. They push the decision to innovate back..."

zakazaka — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:00:06 +0100

“They fear disruption far more than they do destruction. They push the decision to innovate back because things are OK today.”

- On large companies - George W. Buckley, CEO of 3M.

[via Public Strategist]

"I’m interested in the solved problem. I’m interested in high art and real science."

zakazaka — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:00:06 +0100

“I’m interested in the solved problem. I’m interested in high art and real science.”

- Edward Tufte, the information sage

[The Washington Monthly via IfYouOnly via gnat]

The 99% Idea Execution Audit infographic is a really nice...

zakazaka — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:41:44 +0100

The 99% Idea Execution Audit infographic is a really nice presentation of the creative habits of Behance’s 99% community. Click through to download the PDF.

"…learn to recognise opportunities and (more importantly) make sure to seize them. Put yourself..."

zakazaka — Mon, 09 May 2011 10:00:05 +0100

“…learn to recognise opportunities and (more importantly) make sure to seize them. Put yourself out there and make sure you promote yourself both within your Department and beyond. Don’t be afraid to ask – the worst that can happen is you’ll be told “no”. Conversely always be willing to say “yes” – even if it leads down a harder path.”

- Some advice for potential new recruits to Technology in Business I posted on the Civil Service Fast Stream blog last week.

Alpha.gov.uk is promising a step change in how Government does...

zakazaka — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:07:58 +0100

Alpha.gov.uk is promising a step change in how Government does digital (there’s an index card in the photo that reads F*ck IE6 for a start - speaking my language!). If you haven’t yet had a chance to find out what it’s all about, others have covered it in more detail - and there’s an intriguing Get Satisfaction page which gives some clues about what the (pre-)alpha looks like.

The future of government will be previewing from next week, stay tuned to @alphagov to find out exactly when they press the on switch.

"Security officers are rightly fearful of being blamed for incidents, and in the absence of someone..."

zakazaka — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:32:44 +0000

“Security officers are rightly fearful of being blamed for incidents, and in the absence of someone who will act as an advocate for them when things go wrong, they are forced to fall back on the only safe path available to them, which is to say ‘no’ when the business wants to do anything which might carry an associated security risk.”

- Going slightly off-topic, “Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in Modern Britain” perfectly sums up one of the key reasons why innovation is so lacking in Government IT - interestingly edited by David Cameron’s former Chief of Staff.

Start as you mean to go on?

zakazaka — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:01:00 +0000

I’m not a big believer in the mantra I’ve alluded to in the title. I think it’s more important to just start - we live in an age in which it’s becoming increasingly acceptable to try things out, test what works, then learn from mistakes (and from successes).

For some reason all of this seems to have passed Government by, particularly when it comes to technology and its application to some of the most pressing problems we face today.

So if I want this to change, I’d better walk the talk, and get started…

As an IT Professional working in the UK Civil Service, I’m going to start by exploring what can be done to improve how we use IT/technology/the web/digital, as well as the more fundamental cultural, managerial, and leadership issues we face in the Public Sector. I’ll also talk about anything that interests me professionally, drawn from experience past, present and wherever I go in future. This could end up being anything from Green IT to Behavioural Science, Search Engine Optimisation to SharePoint Implementation, Keyboard Shortcuts to Excel Tutorials - we’ll see what happens. If you want something a bit more fun, try my personal Tumblr - this one is definitely the drier, geekier cousin to thus spoke zakazaka.

I’ll probably get it wrong at times - I’m in the early stages of my career, and don’t claim to be an expert on anything; I’ll welcome any (constructive) comments once I’ve got Discus set up. Of course all the opinions expressed in this blog and elsewhere are my own, not that of my employer, and I’ll of course be mindful of what I should and shouldn’t disclose (let me know if I’ve overstepped the line at any point).

You can of course follow me on twitter, connect via LinkedIn, ask a question, or contact me privately.