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- Install MongoDB >
- Install MongoDB Enterprise >
- Install MongoDB Enterprise on Linux >
- Install MongoDB Enterprise Edition on Red Hat or CentOS
Install MongoDB Enterprise Edition on Red Hat or CentOS¶
Use this tutorial to install MongoDB Enterprise on Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
CentOS Linux, or Oracle Linux [1] from
.rpm packages
via the
yum package manager.
Production Notes
Before deploying MongoDB in a production environment, consider the Production Notes document.
Platform Support¶
MongodDB 4.2 supports the following 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS Linux, and Oracle Linux [1]:
- RHEL / CentOS / Oracle 8 (Starting in version 4.2.1)
- RHEL / CentOS / Oracle 7
- RHEL / CentOS / Oracle 6
MongoDB only supports the 64-bit versions of these platforms.
See Supported Platforms for more information.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) - Unsupported
MongoDB does not support WSL, and users on WSL have encountered various issues installing on WSL. For examples, see:
|(1, 2) MongoDB only supports Oracle Linux running the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK). MongoDB does not support the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK).
Install MongoDB Enterprise¶
To install a different version of MongoDB, please refer to that version's documentation. To install the previous version, see the tutorial for version 4.0.
.rpm Packages (Recommended)¶
Use the provided distribution packages as described in this page if possible. These packages will automatically install all of MongoDB's dependencies, and are the recommended installation method.
Configure repository.¶
Create an
/etc/yum.repos.d/mongodb-enterprise-4.2.repo file so that
you can install MongoDB enterprise directly using
If you have a
mongodb-enterprise.repo file
in this directory from a previous installation of MongoDB, you
should remove it. Use the
file above to install MongoDB 4.2.
You can also download the
.rpm files directly from the
MongoDB repository. Downloads are organized by Red Hat / CentOS
version (e.g.
7), then MongoDB
release version
4.2), then architecture (e.g.
Odd-numbered MongoDB release versions, such as 4.1, are development
versions and are unsuitable for production deployment.
Install the MongoDB Enterprise packages.¶
Install MongoDB Enterprise 4.2.¶
Issue the following command:
Install a specific release of MongoDB Enterprise.¶
To install a specific release, you must specify each component package individually along with the version number, as in the following example:
If you only install
mongodb-enterprise=4.2.2 and do not include the
component packages, the latest version of each MongoDB package will be
installed regardless of what version you specified.
Pin a specific version of MongoDB Enterprise.¶
Although you can specify any available version of MongoDB
yum upgrades the packages when a newer
version becomes available. To prevent unintended upgrades, pin
the package by adding the following
exclude directive to your
/etc/yum.conf file:
See also
The recommended procedure to install is through the package manager,
as detailed on this page. However, if you choose to install by
directly downloading the
.tgz file, see
Install MongoDB Enterprise on Red Hat or CentOS Using .tgz Tarball.
Run MongoDB Enterprise¶
Directory Paths¶
To Use Default Directories¶
By default, MongoDB runs using the
mongod user account and
uses the following default directories:
/var/lib/mongo(the data directory)
/var/log/mongodb(the log directory)
- ➤ If you installed via the package manager,
- The default directories are created, and the owner and group for
these directories are set to
- ➤ If you installed by downloading the tarballs,
The default MongoDB directories are not created. To create the MongoDB data and log directories:
Depending on your user permission, you may need to use
sudoto perform these operations.
By default, MongoDB runs using the
mongoduser account. Once created, set the owner and group of these directories to
To Use Non-Default Directories¶
To use a data directory and/or log directory other than the default directories:
Depending on your user permission, you may need to use
to perform these operations.
Create the new directory or directories.
Edit the the configuration file
/etc/mongod.confand modify the following fields accordingly:
storage.dbPathto specify a new data directory path (e.g.
systemLog.pathto specify a new log file path (e.g.
Ensure that the user running MongoDB has access to the directory or directories:
If you change the user that runs the MongoDB process, you must give the new user access to these directories.
Configure SELinux if enforced. See Configure SELinux.
Configure SELinux¶
If SELinux is in
enforcing mode, you must customize your SELinux
policy for MongoDB.
The current SELinux Policy does not allow the MongoDB process to
/sys/fs/cgroup, which is required to determine
the available memory on your system. If you intend to run SELinux in
enforcing mode, you will need to make the following adjustment
to your SELinux policy:
Ensure your system has the
checkpolicypackage installed:
Create a custom policy file
Once created, compile and load the custom policy module by running these three commands:
The MongoDB process is now able to access the correct files with
SELinux set to
You will also need to further customize your SELinux policy in the
following two cases if SELinux is in
enforcing mode:
- You are not using the default MongoDB directories (for RHEL 7.0), and/or
- You are not using default MongoDB ports.
Non-Default MongoDB Directory Path(s)¶
Update the SELinux policy to allow the
mongodservice to use the new directory:
where specify one of the following types as appropriate:
mongod_var_lib_tfor data directory
mongod_log_tfor log file directory
mongod_var_run_tfor pid file directory
Be sure to include the
.*at the end of the directory.
Update the SELinux user policy for the new directory:
where specify one of the following types as appropriate:
mongod_var_lib_tfor data directory
mongod_log_tfor log directory
mongod_var_run_tfor pid file directory
Apply the updated SELinux policies to the directory:
For examples:
- Depending on your user permission, you may need to use
sudoto perform these operations.
- Be sure to include the
.*at the end of the directory for the
semanage fcontextoperations.
If using a non-default MongoDB data path of
If using a non-default MongoDB log directory of
/mongodb/log(e.g. if the log file path is
Non-Default MongoDB Ports¶
Depending on your user permission, you may need to use
sudo to
perform the operation.
Optional. Suppress
FTDC Warnings¶
The current SELinux Policy does not allow the MongoDB process to open
and read
/proc/net/netstat for Diagnostic Parameters (FTDC). As such,
the audit log may include numerous messages regarding lack of access
to this path.
To track the proposed fix, see https://github.com/fedora-selinux/selinux-policy-contrib/pull/79.
Optionally, as a temporary fix, you can manually adjust the SELinux Policy:
Ensure your system has the
checkpolicypackage installed:
Create a custom policy file
Once created, compile and load the custom policy module by running these three commands:
Verify that MongoDB has started successfully¶
You can verify that the
mongod process has started
successfully by checking the contents of the log file at
for a line reading
<port> is the port configured in
27017 by default.
You can optionally ensure that MongoDB will start following a system reboot by issuing the following command:
Begin using MongoDB.¶
Start a
mongo shell on the same host machine as the
mongod. You can run the
mongo shell
without any command-line options to connect to a
mongod that is running on your localhost with default
port 27017:
For more information on connecting using the
shell, such as to connect to a
mongod instance running
on a different host and/or port, see The mongo Shell.
To help you start using MongoDB, MongoDB provides Getting Started Guides in various driver editions. See Getting Started for the available editions.
Uninstall MongoDB¶
To completely remove MongoDB from a system, you must remove the MongoDB applications themselves, the configuration files, and any directories containing data and logs. The following section guides you through the necessary steps.
This process will completely remove MongoDB, its configuration, and all databases. This process is not reversible, so ensure that all of your configuration and data is backed up before proceeding.
Remove Packages.¶
Remove any MongoDB packages that you had previously installed.
Remove Data Directories.¶
Remove MongoDB databases and log files.
MongoDB provides officially supported Enterprise packages in their own repository. This repository contains the following packages:
|Package Name
metapackage that will automatically install
the four component packages listed below.
|Contains the
mongod daemon and associated
configuration and init scripts.
|Contains the
mongos daemon.
|Contains the
mongo shell.
|Contains the following MongoDB tools:
/etc/mongod.conf configuration file supplied by the
package sets
bind_ip to
127.0.0.1 by default. Modify
this setting as needed for your environment before initializing a
replica set.


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League One Hartlepool have sacked boss Mick Wadsworth following a run of seven successive home defeats. First-team coach Micky Barron will take charge of the side at Brentford on Saturday.
A club statement read: "It is with regret that Hartlepool United have relieved Mick Wadsworth of his duties as head coach with immediate effect.
"Following a good start to the season, although the away performances have yielded some results, regrettably the last seven home defeats have been of concern and it was felt that a fresh direction was required.
"We would like to wish Mick all the very best for his future career and thank him for his efforts since joining the club in July 2010. His contribution and wealth of experience during that time has been greatly appreciated by the chairman, club owners and everyone associated with the club."
The game is about opinions. Make yours heard! Join the tribalfootball.com nation on Facebook today: Facebook.com/tribalfootball

subset: commoncrawl


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Politico writers Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen are on to something with their feature published today about President Obama's mastery of the mainstream media. Their conclusion that the president and his staff have broken new ground in manipulating journalists and shaping favorable coverage of the administration is so obvious that it is almost inarguable. As I have argued several times over the past four years, no president since John F. Kennedy has enjoyed the sort of advantage or lack of serious scrutiny that the president has received. Vandehei and Allen are right when they point out that the calculated leaks, softball interview combined with a command of social media and other methods that limit press access have combined to build the Obama juggernaut that won him re-election as well as give him an edge in any battle with Congress.
Yet Vandehei and Allen's insistence that this has nothing to do with the conservative belief that "a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated" ignores some of the same facts that they amass in discussing the way the president has played the "puppet master" with the media. No matter how smart the strategies employed by the White House, the president's ability to skate through four years without getting seriously challenged by the mainstream media would not have been possible if most of those being played were not willing accomplices. Due credit must be given to the administration's ability to take advantage of technology as well as their brilliant if unscrupulous game playing with journalists. But without the liberal bias of most of the mainstream outlets that let the president play them like a piano, he would come across as a bully and a demagogue rather than the reasonable nice guy seen in those "60 Minutes" interviews he loves to give.


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The Author Hotline
being developed by CW4K, or Creative Writing 4 Kids. They are the company behind a website that enables children to create and publish their own stories online. In its first year it has signed up over 2000 members and has been enthusiastically received by children, parents and teachers. In fact the response has been so encouraging that they are planning a huge expansion of its services. Embedding The Author Hotline into the site is part of that expansion...
For more information on CW4K CLICK HERE
Q: What were you like at school?
Dead shy in primary because I was younger than everyone else. Much more confident in my secondary school.
Q: What did you want to be when you were a child?
Nothing. I honestly think I didn't truly believe that children really did turn into those grey boring adults.
Q: Which three words describe you best?
Determined, cheerful, untidy.
Q: What is your favourite word?
Galleon. But I also love the word silver and the word frangipani, so it was hard to choose an absolute favourite.
Q: What makes you cringe?
People flaunting their expensive possessions. People spitting in public. I think that is disgusting. Litter left lying all over. People sniffing on trains because they have their headphones on and so don't realise what a noise they're making. (As you can guess, I spend a lot of time cringing. Perhaps it's as well that I stay home so much, writing my books.)
Q: What are you afraid of?
Running out of good books to read - but, mercifully, it never seems to happen.
Q: When did you last have a really good laugh?
This morning, when someone sent a fan letter about Bill's New Frog.
Q: What is your most treasured possession?
If there was a fire, or a flood, I'd let out my beloved dog LULU and then run for my drawer of photos of my children and grandchildren. And once that was safely pulled out and rescued, I'd probably go back for my two Carnegie medals, my two Whitbread Awards, my two Nibbies, my Smarties and Nasen awards and my Children's Laureate medallion. I'd reckon all the furniture and curtains and stuff could easily be replaced, but those couldn't.
Q: What do you do as a hobby?
I read. And I take my dog for walks. And I do love films. I watch a lot in the cinema, and quite a few more at home. I also like one or two of those television half hour comedies. Some of them, like the Simpsons, are BRILLIANTLY written.
Q: What strange habits do you have?
I bite my nails till they bleed. (That's not strange in itself, but it's a little odd for someone my age). I can't recycle any printed matter until I've read it. That's an odd habit. But I have had a huge number of odd ideas for books, and bits of books, from doing it. Even the whole idea for Flour Babies came from a tiny snippet in a magazine about a California school.
Q: What's your favourite food?
Fish, unless I'm cooking, in which case it's toasted cheese because that's quicker and easier. I have occasional cravings for chocolate. My favourite breakfast is crunchy granola, and I make my own in huge quantities.
Q: What do you day dream about?
I never day dream. I always end up doing or reading something instead.
Q: Do you feel younger or older than your current age?
I have felt thirty ever since I was thirty. There's a poem by Anne Sexton with the line, "In a dream, you are never eighty."
Q: What quality do you most admire in a person?
Moral courage. And empathy - which means being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, and think, 'How would s/he feel?' It is a lack of empathy, for example, that leads to bullying and cruelty. I tried to write about that in a comedy called The Angel of Nitshill Road, for 6-10 year olds. (And for older and younger, if you're being bullied!)
Q: What is the most interesting place you have ever visited?
Istanbul. I went when I was twenty, years and years ago. And it was so exotic and different: the spicy smells, the markets, the beautiful strange mosques, the clothes. I had never been anywhere so 'foreign'. I've been to all sorts of places since, but never had such a striking feeling of being in a strange and timeless land.
Q: What is the best advice anyone has ever given you?
"Work out what you like doing most in all the world, and then look round for someone who will pay you to do it."
Q: What has life taught you?
To know when to knock off and go to bed with a good book. Sometimes enough is enough, and you just need time to gather yourself together quietly and alone.
Q: What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
If I could sing, I would have loved to have been an opera singer. I think that must be the most wonderful job in the world, even though it sounds exhausting, with all the travel, and your work booked years ahead. But to sing for a living? Bliss! Sadly, I can't (as the Americans say) carry a tune in a bag. So that was out. I like driving. If it weren't for global warming, I might like to become a chauffeur. But now I think the people I'd drive should really go by train.
Q: How long have you been a writer?
Since the day in my early twenties when, because of a blizzard, I couldn't get to the library to change my books, so sat down and began to write one.
Q: Where do you do your writing?
Anywhere, so long as it's quiet. (I don't mind industrial banging, or traffic. It's music and voices I can't write against.)
Q: What are the best and worst things about being an author?
The best is the silence and the control.
Q: Where do you get your greatest ideas from?
All round. What I see, snippets I read, things I overhear, worries on my mind. Anything and everything. The craft is to get to recognise how you can use it.
Q: What book do you wish you had written?
The Once and Future King (all 4 books of it) by T H White.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Read, read, read. Every book you read will turn you into a better author later. Then sit down and write the book that you yourself would most like to read. (So often, a writer's first book is their very best).
Nag Club
Published By
In Print
Jennifer's Diary
Published By
In Print
The Angel of Nitshill Road
Published By
In Print
Crummy Mummy and Me
Published By
In Print
The More the Merrier
Published By
Random House
In Print
Step by Wicked Step
Published By
In Print
Flour Babies
Published By
In Print
Up on Cloud Nine
Published By
Random House
In Print
The Book of the Banshee
Published By
Random House
In Print
The Tulip Touch
Published By
In Print


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Turquoise Bay Dive & Beach Resort
Turquoise Bay a new Mediterranean style dive and beach resort in the unspoiled East End of Roatan. The all inclusive resort is located 15 minutes past French Harbour in Milton Bight on the north side of Roatan. The gourmet restaurant and all 26 rooms have an unobstructed view over the beach and the beautiful lagoon. Weather you are coming for scuba diving or just to enjoy the beautiful private beach, protected by the offshore reefs and mangroves you will enjoy the tranquility and excellent service. Diving and all PADI courses are offered by Subway Watersports.
- Dive Shop
- Private Bath
- Hot Water
- Fan
- Pool
- Oceanfront
- Bar
- Restaurant
- Cable TV
- Internet
Milton Bight, Roatan


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free nigerian movies roku
, television, news soap and more. join us at http://muntumedia.com and enjoy black entertainment. Africa narrated by Africans. Through our collections of African countries national televisions, we deliver the latest news in the continent. Nollywood is a moving and fast growing industry. With daily production, nigeria has storm the african movies industry. Sometimes blame for the quality of movies and issue with sound, image, the main focus remain to entertain the audience. Future development may focus on improving the quality and stories. like a child we crow, walk and later run race against hollywood productions.
With free nigerian movies roku the african american market is totally served. Canada and the UK is served as well and many other country where we provide the roku box to our clients and subscribers in the world. Considering the low subscription price, its a give away to meet our clients needs. Many african television on roku free, and more in one single place. You can comment the latest development of news in africa with your friend and family at home. What do you think about the last congress ruling? how local population perceive the changes? why they should not be fooled by the authority and the ruling class.
Get involve in your native community life and changes, don't be just another african from diaspora. Not interested in africa matters and yet not welcome in western public opinion. The african independent television ait on roku is the leading private televison in nigeria and can give another view, from a different angle. Nta on roku is your home news from abba state, lagos, kano, benin and more.
The most dominant and populous country in Africa have a story to tell with free nigerian movies roku. The billboard of the world and leader in delivering content on internet everywhere.


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Local Information: Clontarf, Co. Dublin
Set in an 11th-century castle the Clontarf Hotel combines ancient architecture with 21st-century facilities. 10 minutes' from Dublin city centre, this boutique hotel offers an award-winning restaurant and luxurious bedrooms.
Note: Map is an approximate indication ONLY. Please contact Clontarf Castle Hotel for directions and precise location prior to your visit.


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For the sweet and sour dressing start by making a syrup adding chili, garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil.
Each mini garden will have "planted" tiny sticks of apple, celery, spring onion, oranges, little leaves of cilantro, kaffir, alfalfa sprouts and sunflower sprouts.
At the bottom I added smoked shredded trout with green mango ginger relish.


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ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at firstname.lastname@example.com.
- Buttry, Daniel
- 1 Arizona State University
- 1 Friesen, Cody
- 1 Sieradzki, Karl
- 1 Zeller, Robert August
- 1 English
- 1 Public
- Chemistry
- Oxygen Reduction
- 1 Energy
- 1 Fuel Cell
- 1 Ionic Liquid
- 1 Materials Science
- 1 Metal-Air
- more
- 1 Proton Activity
- Dwarf Galaxies as Laboratories of Protogalaxy Physics: Canonical Star Formation Laws at Low Metallicity
- Evolutionary Genetics of CORL Proteins
- Social Skills and Executive Functioning in Children with PCDH-19
- Deep Domain Fusion for Adaptive Image Classification
- Software Defined Pulse-Doppler Radar for Over-The-Air Applications: The Joint Radar-Communications Experiment
Mechanisms for oxygen reduction are proposed for three distinct cases covering two ionic liquids of fundamentally different archetypes and almost thirty orders of magnitude of proton activity. Proton activity is treated both extrinsically by varying the concentration and intrinsically by selecting proton donors with a wide range of aqueous pKa values. The mechanism of oxygen reduction in ionic liquids is introduced by way of the protic ionic liquid (pIL) triethylammonium triflate (TEATf) which shares some similarities with aqueous acid solutions. Oxygen reduction in TEATf begins as the one electron rate limited step to form superoxide, O2*-, which is then rapidly …
- Contributors
- Zeller, Robert August, Friesen, Cody, Sieradzki, Karl, et al.
- Created Date
- 2011


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Like many Jewish holidays, food is the center of the celebration during Hanukkah. The eight day festivities are chock-full of presents, candle lighting and super delicious (but equally messy) latkes. Enjoying the Festival of Lights doesn't mean your kitchen has to suffer! Here's how to enjoy latkes without enduring a grease-fest.
Photo: An Edible Mosaic
Note: If you're planning on painting your kitchen anytime soon, it's very important to remove the grease first because the stains will bleed right through the new coat of paint.
1. Mix ½ cup of vinegar with ½ cup of hot (but not scalding) water.
2. Using a washcloth or soft towel, blot the greased-up wall carefully. Don't scrub, because you'll damage the paint!
3. With a second towel, rinse the area with warm water.
4. Allow your walls to dry. If the grease stain is still there, it's time to break out the big guns: dish soap.
5. Squirt a small amount of dishwashing soap onto the greasy wall. Blot, don't scrub, the soap into the wall using a soft cloth in hot water. Then, rinse the area with a second warm cloth. You might have to rinse the area a couple of times to remove all of the suds.
Now that you can clean the grease-mess with ease, go latke-crazy! If you're looking for an alternative to traditional potato latkes this year, try this carrot-apple latkes recipe from An Edible Mosaic – sour cream optional!


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PASADENA, Calif. – Whitworth opened its traditional spring break trip to Southern California with a 7-2 win over Caltech in men's tennis on Monday afternoon.
The Pirates improved to 5-10 while the Beavers fell to 0-11.
The teams played singles first on Monday and Whitworth grabbed a 4-2 lead. Cameron Williams took a 6-4, 6-1 win over Devashish Joshi at #1 singles while John Talbot and Dustin McConnell earned straight sets wins at #5 and #6 singles. Blake Miller pulled out a 6-2, 4-6, 6-3 win at #4 singles.
Chris Engelmann dropped a 6-4, 4-6, 6-2 loss at #3 singles, while Drew Brigham fell in the #2 singles match.
Whitworth then put the competition away by sweeping the doubles matches, but all were close. Miller and Troy Patterson clinched the team victory with an 8-5 win at #3 doubles over Rushikesh Joshi and Dylan Schultz. Williams and Brigham pulled out a hard-fought 9-8 (7-2) win over Luka Mernik and Devashish Joshi.
Whitworth returns to action on Thursday with a non-counting exhibition match against College of the Desert in Indian Wells. The Pirates will conclude their trip on Friday with a match at Occidental.


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Experiments in incandescent living
When Halley's Comet swept across the sky in April 1910, New York Times society reporters implied that to live life to the fullest you simply had to attend a rooftop viewing party. I've never cared about staying on top of the trends, but I do enjoy stargazing with a glass of bubbly; so I have reappropriated the "comet party" as a metaphor for living the brightest, most festive version of your life. You want to light up a room, but not in the way people usually employ that phrase: I'm talking about bringing joy and clarity to everyone you meet, and reveling in that effervescent feeling you get when you've made yourself useful.
I write novels for readers of all ages and occasionally blog about books, travel, art, and needlecrafts, but this site is mostly for exploring the connection I've discovered between ethical veganism and creativity. To that end, I'm working on a follow-up book to Life Without Envy called A Bright Clean Mind: Veganism for Creative Transformation, forthcoming in August 2019. If I've piqued your interest, you can subscribe for updates!


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Interim Project Management for Yorkshire Businesses.
Implementing Projects Successfully
Businesses must move forward constantly if they are to remain competitive. However the moving forward is done – most often by a combination of new I.T systems and improved operational processes – this involves change.
Implementing change successfully requires good project management.
Many businesses, especially SME's, do not have the internal resources to manage projects and change as they would like.
Good project management requires the application of knowledge, experience, and supporting tools.
I have all of these, following almost 30 years experience of implementing I.T systems and process improvement initiatives.
Hire me as an interim / consultant project manager and I will help you change.
What I Do
Industry Sectors I Have Worked In
Transferable Skills
At first sight the industry sectors above may all appear very different. However businesses in these sectors, and others, are all faced with the same challenge: how to do more with less.
Usually the means of overcoming the 'more with less' challenge is updating technology and operational processes.
Projects designed to help businesses achieve these aims have many things in common, regardless of specific industry sectors.
Although, having said that, it can sometimes be beneficial to apply approaches and lessons learned from one industry sector to another.
So even if you do not see your industry sector listed above, please contact me anyway for an informal chat. At the very least, I am sure we would both learn something from the conversation.
Project Handover and Training
All organisations can improve their project delivery capability and project maturity.
With this in mind I always promote a project-based mindset, supported by project processes, in the organisations I am involved with.
Project handover therefore goes beyond simply completing the project.
I enjoy knowledge transfer along with more formal training of people about how to put the principles of project management into practice. I like helping the development of individuals and their employer organisation.
About Me - Antony Smith
I am an experienced project manager, a long time member of the Association for Project Management (MAPM) and Project Management Institute (PMI). I have post-graduate level qualifications in project management, I.T and law and I am also Prince II qualified (practitioner level).
I am a non-practising solicitor, which explains the particular interest in the legal industry. After leaving academia I started out commercially as a legal expert system developer. Even as a young solicitor I was always more interested in software and operational processes than practising law…


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Farhad Manjoo's column in the New York Times discusses a recent ruling by a French court that Google—and any other search engines—are required to "de-link" information that European citizens want buried about themselves, under the continent's "right to be forgotten" law. If upheld, it could mean the end of your ability to easily find useful dirt about fraudsters, or criminal histories, bankruptcies, and scandals about, well anyone. Proponents of the law say that old information about them is not "relevant" and invades their privacy. Carrying around on one's back the sum total of one's publicized deeds and misdeeds is too heavy a burden, they say. But what is "character" but the sum of one's acts? In a "global economy," in which trade partners usually cannot know each others' reputations directly, how but a Google search—augmented by court records and other public documents—can the parties decide whether to trust each other? What about the public's right to know about someone independent of what their publicist or lawyer says? "When we're talking about a broadly scoped right to be forgotten that's about altering the historical record or making information that was lawfully public no longer accessible to people, I don't see a way to square that with a fundamental right to access to information," Emma Llansó, a free expression scholar at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a tech-focused think tank that is funded in part by corporations, including Google, told Manjoo. Privacy proponents say this is really just about removing bank account numbers and revenge porn. They note that Google already removes some content on the request of, say, copyright holders. Google's Larry Page says the problem boils down to the definition of "private." This is a tricky question (and one that news editors confront often). "Is an article about a British reality TV star about a private person, or is it about a public figure that you and I should be able to search for?" Manjoo writes. "That's hard to answer — but a French regulator may soon decide for you, regardless." (Edward Ericson Jr.)
As far as we're concerned, this stupid Drake vs. Meek Mill rap "beef" is really about class. A Canadian child star-turned-rapper using his pop success to take down a grassroots Philly street dude who made his way into the mainstream because the mainstream couldn't ignore his underground success any longer. It's one of the haves terrorizing one of the have-nots and winning because the industry will side with the more marketable have because he's more cuddly and does Sprite commercials. Though yes, Meek Mill totally turfed out with his response track. But even if he had lyrically slayed Drake, he wouldn't have won because the game isn't set-up for Meek Mill types to win anymore. Anyways, over at Pitchfork, Meaghan Garvey approaches Drake's general ickiness a little differently. In "I'm Breaking Up With Drake" she characterizes the way that Drake's obsequious sad-bro rap for a moment there, became increasingly compelling, even as he got more corny, while also diagnosing the way that he has "flipped from corny but ultimately harmless to legitimately toxic," as of late. Namely, that his rhetoric has tilted toward "underhanded misogyny" as he mocks Meek Mill for pretty much being in a good relationship with a strong, interesting woman, Nicki Minaj. "Never mind the delusional mental gymnastics required for a guy who built an empire off projections of sensitivity and simpering anecdotes refusing to let go of a single hook-up of the past decade to declare 'No woman ever had me star-struck,'" Garvey writes. See, Garvey's a Drake fan (full disclosure: I contributed to a Drake tribute zine she put together a couple years ago) so her critiques are stronger than most, and they go big picture too. The piece is, ultimately, a rumination on millennial making-yourself moves, personal growth (or lack thereof), and growing up, and, well, Jesus Christ it ends like this: "[Drake's rhetoric is] about the banal sociopathy of late capitalism, brand over soul, [he's] a charming huckster playing an infinite shell game. It's the triumph of content creation, analytics over everything, the numb acceptance of Sprite as our House of Medici. It's about lying to yourself and the world for so long that you actually start to believe it. Maybe Drake is the ultimate millennial rapper. Look what we've done." (Brandon Soderberg)
So much shit happened at last night's Republican primary debate. Donald Trump did Donald Trump things. Chris Christie and Rand Paul argued about hugs (and the Fourth Amendment). Jeb Bush sold out his brother. But did you see who crashed? It was none other than Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco. Well, not literally. Football blogger PFTCommenter stood outside the set of "Hardball with Chris Matthews" holding a sign that read "Is Joe Flacco a Elite Quarterback?" Anybody who has spent any amount of time watching the inanity of sports commentary shows or listening to talk radio knows the question has dogged Flacco, to the point of it becoming a meme because the idea that such a thing can be quantified is so absurd. Maybe the candidates can weigh in on Flacco's eliteness at the next debate. (Brandon Weigel)


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My long-awaited debut album. 16 tracks of pure, unadulterated Offbeat goodness, covering everything from gentrification to growing up as a Hip Hop fan in the Cotswolds!
- Exclusive production by Odd Chap
- Guest vocals from Sharleena Ray, Kirris Riviere and more
- Artwork by Alex Moore
Please note at present this website is the ONLY place you can listen to the album in its entirety. I will be uploading tracks to YouTube and Spotify each month, but if you want to hear the entire album, this is the only place to get it!
Get the Deluxe version with instrumentals for an extra £5!


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You can do everything online these days. For example, you can order groceries for home delivery, make a pizza order, and in some cases, consult with your physician via video conference. You can also apply for an online auto loan with online banks and traditional lending institutions. Although applying for loans on the internet may spark anxiety in some people, it is a safe way to obtain financing provided you follow common sense rules and only deal with reputable sites. When you proceed with caution, you may find yourself benefiting from an online auto loan.
Save Time and Money
One of the obvious benefits you gain from completing loan paperwork through the internet can be seen in the huge time and money savings potential. You save time in a variety of ways. First, you apply directly to the bank instead of sitting in a glass cubicle while the salesperson runs back and forth haggling and shuffling paperwork. You may also be able to find a site that takes your information for a few lenders at a single time, providing you with a choice of financing options. In addition to saving time, you may be able to save money in application fees and interest rates. Online financing is a competitive business, so lenders are more apt to provide deals or lower rates to attract customers,
Choose Your Own Loan Options
When you apply for an online auto loan, you can take advantage of more flexibility and options. Often, you do not get the full picture when dealing with banks through a dealership. Although there are some dealerships who do take advantage of customers, there are also many that deal ethically with financial issues. At the same time, the dealership's ultimate goal is to sell you a car. Even an honest dealership is probably only going to go so far to protect your interests. If you are financially savvy and have a good grasp on how to avoid scams and issues online, you may be better off brokering your own online auto loan because of this.
Enter the Dealership with Leverage
You might have heard that people who pay for a vehicle with cash often get a great deal. One of the reasons this is true is because they walk into the lot confident about their purchase. They know they have the power to buy the car they want at the location they choose. If they do not strike a deal, they can move on to another dealership. You will have the same leverage if you get an online auto loan.
An online auto loan is something you should not jump into lightly. Although instant access to application processes encourages impulse action, you should consider your options carefully. You should also do some background research to ensure you are dealing with a legitimate, honest company. Check the Better Business Bureau for unresolved customer complaints and Google the business. You also should never work with an online company that does not post full contact information on their site.


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Spectrim Automates Quality Control with Machine Learning
The Spectrim optical sorting platform recently launched for the food and beverage industry. The platform uses machine learning software to perform quality checks of fruit. The Spectrim optical sorting platform. (Image courtesy Compac.) Spectrim can detect hard to find external blemishes on fruit and automatically separate produce by grade using existing technology. The platform is capable of taking up to 500 high definition images of a single piece of fruit as it passes through the sorting machine at a rate of 12 pieces of fruit per second. Similar machine learning technology has been used before by Google's DeepDream software and Bonirob's farming robots. Blemishes, bruises and rot on apples are highlighted and classified. (Image courtesy Compac.) Operators must first teach the Spectrim platform the difference between good and bad apple…
Link to Full Article: Spectrim Automates Quality Control with Machine Learning
Spectrim Automates Quality Control with Machine Learning


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In El Zarrio Films, we´ve spent years making wedding videos and telling different stories of brides and grooms who open up their hearts to tell the world about the importance of love. So when we knew about the beautiful wedding of Lujain and Aimen, we could not resist.
The bride got dressed in a room with a sea view at the luxurious Marbella Club. She was spectacular in a Naeem Khan dress and a perfect headdress by AURA Headpieces. The venue was very close from Marbella Club, in one of the most emblematic restaurants of Marbella, the Villa Tiberio. Under a pergola they celebrated the marriage, surrounded by green gardens that characterizes this restaurant. All guests were waiting while bridesmaids, sisters of the bride, made their entry, and then, give way to a stunning bride and a happy groom to meet, and say the "Yes, I do". Everything was surrounded by cinephile and fairytale atmosphere. A huge movie screen was over the banquet tables and at night, the show began. Several short films made by Lujain and Aimen were played on the screen. And one of the most emotional moments of the night was when the bride told his vows to the groom through a short animation designed by her and made by a new Lebanese cinema talent. A perfect surprise for such a perfect wedding. Of course, there was a cake with a design of Disney Castle and a dance that could have been in a romantic tale, in which the couple danced to the music of one of the classic Disney´s, Sleeping Beauty. The event was organized by Jessica from White Wedding Days, that made a perfect wedding full of details and that night became one of the best night of Lujain & Aimen lives.
You cannot miss this destination wedding video because it is also part of their story.


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Guaranteed HVAC Services in Baton Rouge and Surrounding Areas
Keeping all of your family members and guests in your home comfortable means you will need a reliable HVAC system. That's why the professionals at River City's One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating provide a full array of HVAC services.
HVAC Installation
HVAC equipment is almost always running, and the stress and wear are often compounded by passive heat gain such as the number of people in the house, sunlight through the windows, heat from cooking and laundry and many other things we do in the course of our everyday life. At River City's One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating, we design every heating and cooling system according to ACCA Manual J standards, so every room in your home will receive the right amount of conditioned air.
Our trained and certified technicians understand the complexity of heating and cooling equipment. They pay particular attention to the air distribution system by strapping and sealing all the ductwork connections. When the job is completed, we'll performance-test the system to ensure it's working the way the manufacturer intended.
HVAC Repair
Heating and cooling equipment problems can be complex, costly and disruptive. If the system fails completely, family members will be miserable. You need to partner with a qualified HVAC repair company that knows how to troubleshoot any brand or type of air conditioner or heater.
Our service technicians have a deep understanding of the refrigeration cycle, air side fundamentals and 3-phase electrical systems. Our service technicians have experience fixing package units, furnaces, heat pumps, air conditioning systems, ductless systems, and more, from all manufacturers.
If you have a unit break down unexpectedly, time is of the essence. Our NATE-certified technicians are equipped with the latest tools so they can diagnose the problem and quickly affect the required repairs. We offer an on-time and 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, and the price we quote is the price you'll pay. 24/7 hour response is always available.
HVAC Maintenance
You want your home to be comfortable at all times for your family, so the best HVAC strategy is to avoid a costly breakdown. Preventive maintenance is the best investment you can make to ensure your equipment always operates at peak efficiency.
Our flexible residential maintenance includes a variety of important services designed to identify small problems before they grow into big ones. On a regular basis, one of our service techs will visit your home to test, calibrate and inspect capacitors, coils, relays, compressors and other critical components.
Comprehensive Contractor Services
If you're looking for the best HVAC services in Baton Rouge, Denham Springs, Prairieville, Gonzales, Zachary, Clinton, Hammond, LA or the surrounding area, call one of our friendly representatives today to arrange for a free system evaluation. Local, and family-owned, our goal is your 100-percent satisfaction.


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As of just about last summer, I'd fallen in love with almond butter. However, nuts and nut butters are high in fats. Yes, they are healthy fats, but just because something is good for you doesn't mean you should eat it in excess. You're actually just cancelling out the benefits in doing so. MODERATION!
This being said, I still love my share (healthy portion) of almond butter!
I've been buying my almond butter from the health food store where you can "make your own" by placing raw almonds into a large, noisy machine that grinds out a slightly gritty yet creamy and, of course, delicious nut butter. However, I've read a lot of posts for a more cost effective way to make your own.
If you have access to a health food store where you can buy your almonds in bulk – do it! Making your own almond butter requires patience, so if you're in a bit of a hurry – save it for another day!
Homemade Vanilla Almond Butter
1 Cup Raw Almonds* (I toasted, but you can make with raw nuts)
1 teaspoon Vanilla
Sprinkle of Sea Salt
*To toast the almonds, add to the frying pan (DRY) and let toast for about 5 minutes until fragrant and browned, tossing/mixing frequently. Don't overcook!
After allowing to cool, add almonds to food processor and blend away! I failed to take my own photos of the process, however the Rawmazing Blog has a great description of the blending process. Make sure you scrape the sides every so often which will help keep all the almonds incorporated and give your food processor a second to cool down a bit. You may think it's done when it rolls up in a ball and makes a funny noise, but it is not, so be patient! Let it get nice and creamy.
Add your sea salt and give it an extra pulse. Wait until you take the almond butter out of the processor and into a jar/container to add the vanilla and mix it up. Vanilla bean may be a great inversion here to amp up the flavor. Feel free to add a little more extract if you like a stronger flavor!
You can add other flavors like honey or cinnamon to make it your own as well!
Has anyone ever experimented adding chai tea to homemade almond butter?


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American Hemp
American Values, Patriotism and Faith in the Heritage of Hemp
Peter Elser walked along the banks of the Middle Creek in Clay Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He found the spot where in 1760 he erected a hemp mill that would stay in continuous family operation for one hundred years.
All through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and during long periods of peace the Elser's hemp mill processed fiber from the stalks of hemp grown by the farmers in the surrounding area.
Around the time of the Civil War, after providing a good living for the family for a full century, the mill ceased its operations. The unique, conical-shaped 1,600 pound millstone was taken from its place in the mill and placed in the Elser meadow. There it sat as a monument to the past for 88 years, slowly sinking into the fresh, fertile Lancaster County soil.
The story is unique; and yet not unique. During the same time period hemp mills could be found basically wherever there were settlements and men with plows.
As our view zooms out we see that hemp was grown in all parts of the neighboring states of Pennsylvania – in Delaware, in Maryland, in New Jersey, in New York and in Ohio. From the 1600 until the 1840's hemp was nearly universal in all of those states.
We zoom out some more. We see the New England states – Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island all grew hemp in great abundance. We see the states to the south – Virginia, where the cultivation of hemp became legendary, grown at Mt. Vernon by George Washington, at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson, at Colonial Williamsburg and all throughout the state. We see the Carolinas, both North and South, famous for their hemp. Georgia, Tennessee, also hemp producing states.
All of the 13 original colonies grew hemp in abundance for many generations and as settlements moved west the industry naturally followed. We find Kentucky becoming the great hemp-producing state, famous the world over. We find Missouri eventually claiming the lead from Kentucky in hemp production. It spreads and thrives in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and all the states of the Midwest.
Hemp was grown in Pennsylvania from the 1650's until the 1940's, almost 300 years, but it was during the time of the Revolution that the great golden heyday of hemp spread far and wide throughout the young nation.
Hemp was grown in the Lone Star state of Texas at an early date and revived in the 1930's for a time. It was grown in California, Oregon, Iowa, and all throughout the Northwest.
Every state in the United States of America can lay claim to at one time having a thriving industry. It is a fascinating story seldom told and for a time, forgotten.
Religion characterized the life of those who toiled the soil of early America as it still does to a great degree today. Their belief in God was unshakeable and deep. They gave thanks for all things. Many of the hemp mill owners in Lancaster County were Mennonites and in some cases Mennonite preachers. There are stories of church services sometimes being held in the old hemp mills.
Since the culture of hemp was so universally prevalent we find that farmers of all sorts of religious denominations grew hemp. Presbyterian ministers were paid in grain and important items such as hemp cloth or hemp fiber so the preacher could make his own clothing.
The Amish grew hemp and so did Catholic farmers and Quakers. The religious community of the Ephrata Cloisters grew hemp as did the Labadist and the Harmony Society, the Shakers and the Schwenkfelders, the Baptist and the Methodists, Moravians and Mormons.
Who can count the thousands of workers then employed in the cultivation of hemp? Many thousands made their livings in the rope factories, the bagging factories, paper mills, oil mills and hemp mills. They were hemp hecklers and weavers and simple farmers.
90% of the clothing worn by the early settlers was made with the homespun hemp, flax and wool grown on their farms. The excess hemp not needed for home manufacture of cloth was sold to the factories.
During the time of the Revolution it became the patriotic duty of American farmers to grow as much hemp as they possibly could. It was a key component in the drive for independence and complete self-reliance and sufficiency. In town and country meetings, the people of America were entering into solemn resolutions not to purchase or consume British commodities until the acts they deemed injurious to their privileges were repealed or be considered enemies of their country.
In 1774, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to address the grave threats to American liberty by Britain. The resolutions passed by the congress were read, approved and put into effect all around America.
On December 21, 1774, the Pennsylvania Gazette published the news of a meeting in the city of Annapolis, Maryland where the proceedings of the Continental Congress were read and unanimously approved. The home production of clothing was a chief goal of the congress so the meeting at Annapolis stated, "To increase the manufacture of linen and cotton, – Resolved, That every planter and farmer ought to raise as much flax, hemp and cotton, as he conveniently can; and the cultivation thereof is particularly recommended to such inhabitants of this province, whose lands are best adapted for this purpose".
They added, "As our opposition to the settled plan of the British administration to enslave America will be strengthened by an union of all ranks of men in this province, we do most earnestly recommend that all former differences about religion or politics and all private animosities and quarrels of every kind, from henceforth cease and be forever buried in oblivion; and we entreat, we conjure every man, by his duty to God, his country, and posterity, cordially to unite in defense of our common rights and liberties".
On the same day as the meeting in Annapolis, a general meeting of the inhabitants of Gloucester County in New Jersey was held in the Gloucester County courthouse to agree with and join in the resolutions of the General American Congress in Philadelphia. They resolved unanimously, "That it will be proper, and appears to this meeting to be absolutely necessary, that our farmers should, as much as possible, apply their grounds to raising flax and hemp; and that our young women, instead of trifling their time away, do prudently employ it in learning the use of the spinning wheel… The time calls for diligence and no hand ought to be idle, that is capable of contributing in the least degree, to support of the public cause".
On January 2, 1775, a meeting was held in Reading, Pennsylvania, where a letter was read proposing a Provincial Convention that was proposed to be held in Philadelphia on January 23 of that year. The committee agreed to the proposed convention and appointed a committee to attend.
Jonathan Potts, the secretary of the meeting, and one of those appointed to attend the convention in Philadelphia wrote the following:
"To the INHABITANTS of BERKS County
Friends and Countrymen, THE affairs of America grow every day more serious, and our unhappy disputes hasten to a conclusion. It becomes us now to call into exercise every public virtue, and to act as become men engaged in the solemn cause of Liberty. The least disunion, the least neglect of duty, will be fatal. The wise regulations pointed out by the Continental Congress, for the preservation of our rights, must be faithfully observed, if we expect to succeed in the present just and necessary defense of our Liberties…
We also beg leave to recommend to the good people of this County, an attention to the raising of Flax and Hemp, and to promote every kind of manufacturing in their respective families. And finally, we request that at this awful crisis of affairs you will carefully attend to the important advice given by the Congress, to avoid every species of extravagance, luxury and dissipation."
The convention for the Province of Pennsylvania went on as planned and they made a collective statement:
"WHEREAS it has been judged necessary for the preservation of our just rights and liberties, to lay a restraint on our importation, and as the freedom, happiness and prosperity of a state greatly depend on providing within itself a supply of articles necessary for the subsistence, clothing and defense, a regard for our country, as well as common prudence, call upon us to encourage agriculture, manufacturers and economy. Therefore this convention resolves as follows…
Resolved unanimously, That each person, having proper land, should raise a quantity of Flax and Hemp sufficient, not only for the use of his own family, but also to spare to others on moderate terms. And that it is recommended to the farmers to provide themselves early with a sufficient quantity of seed for the proposed increase of the above articles of hemp and flax."
"Resolved unanimously, That we recommend the erecting of a great number of Fulling Mills, and Mills for breaking, swingling, and softening hemp and flax. And also for the making of grindstones in this country."
As the crisis wore on there is much evidence that shows that the people of America responded to the patriotic calls of their government. Hemp was grown everywhere and was indeed the most important material in homespun fabrics. True to the recommendations of the convention, hemp and fulling mills were erected in virtually every township in Pennsylvania.
The Revolution had given birth to a new nation and this young nation needed a flag. George Washington asked Betsy Ross in Philadelphia to make a proud banner to wave above the nation and she made the first American flag from homespun American hemp, run up the flagpole with American grown and manufactured hemp rope.
To our forefathers who founded America hemp was a symbol of all of our values – hard work, self-sufficiency, independence, family, home manufacturers, American industry, and Liberty itself.
The Lancaster Sunday News wrote in 1928:
In Colonial times many a rider would hear from a distance a rumbling like low voiced thunder in the direction of the "hanf muhl" (hemp mill) and nod his head approvingly at this sign of industry, for work was the foundation of the colonist creed. When the winter threshing and butchering was done then came the time for the breaking and preparing of hemp for the rope-walk or for spinning at home and weaving at some neighboring loom.
The past is the great informer of the present and combined the two conspire towards the future. We honor our ancestors by learning from them and taking inspiration. They had all the qualities so sorely needed today – they had industry, jobs, work ethic, tradition, strong families, religion and deep spirituality, a connection to the land, roots. They were clothed by the work of their own hands that skillfully wrought the products of the soil grown from the seeds handed down through the long ages.
Hemp, grown throughout the world over the long span of history, was brought to the New World and became thoroughly American. It was a part of our everyday culture and widespread. It is indeed a proud part of our heritage and a shared collective memory, forgotten for a time, but now remembered and revived in the spirit of our forefathers who founded the United States of America.
~Les Stark, Hemp Historian and NHA Contributor


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I've poked fun at Fred and Kimberly Kagan many times in the past, so when they actually come up with something worth our attention, I feel I owe them a nod. Say what you will about the conclusions of their new PowerPoint on Afghanistan, you have to admit they do get down to specifics. For example:
- Available Western "counter-insurgents" — not counting support elements — currently number less than 40,000. "Most Afghans never see a member of ISAF. Afghans who interact with ISAF forces are generally far more concerned with what those forces are doing and whether or not they are providing security than with how many of them there are. The issue of 'foreign occupation' is a propaganda theme, not a finely‐calibrated reality. (Cf. Gulliver.)
- An effective post-withdrawal Predator campaign in Afghanistan would require bases in either Afghanistan or Pakistan due to the UAV's limited range. Ditto SOF raids.
- Adopting a purely CT approach would mean abrogating the U.S. commitment to the Afghanistan Compact. The U.S. would have to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Afghan government to continue CT operations following a withdrawal.
Feel free to take it apart in the comments. I'm quoting it simply because I appreciate the effort to see beyond the rhetoric: What would a CT campaign actually entail? What would a withdrawal look like? You want to draw down, fine. How do you do it?


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12 May 2017
Testing cult beauty blogger makeup | New in from Sephora
11 comments:
Heard SO many mixed reviews about the Too Faced mascara! Never tried it.. yet! xxReplyDelete
I imagine it could be a bit heavy for people with short lashes, and that might be why :)Delete
Steph x
If you could choose only one thing from whole list you mentioned, what would it be? XxXReplyDelete
Paulina, www.blog.paulinakuciak.dkReplies
Hmm ... definitely the Too Faced mascara, it's incredible!Delete
Steph x
Yes! I love ABH Dip brow, mine is so dried up now though :(ReplyDelete
Olivia / Olivia RosesReplies
I've heard a lot of people talking about theirs getting dried up, and I'm so worried now! That's what happened to my NYX oneDelete
Steph x
I love the ABH Dipbrow and have used it for so long, but I think mines drying up! I love the Too Faced Better Than Sex mascara, its so good. I've heard good things about the Kat Von D lipsticks, they sound amazing!ReplyDelete
I'd not heard about anyone's drying up until after I bought one and now everyone's mentioning it! The Too Faced mascara is SO good, it makes me want to try more of their products outDelete
Steph x
This mascara is so tempting :O I hear about it a lot of good reviews :)ReplyDelete
Paulina, www.blog.paulinakuciak.dk
I absolutely love the Kat Von D lipsticks! I'm trying to save some money but these lipsticks keep calling to me! I'd love to try the tattoo liner and the better than sex mascara too! XoxReplyDelete
Ooooh what ones have you tried? The tattoo liner is INCREDIBLEDelete
Steph x
I read each and every one of your comments, and really appreciate the time you've taken to add them! If you want or need a more immediate response then contact me through my twitter @stephhartley4. Thank you!


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Eight Forty-Eight
Chicago filmmaker taps into his Indian roots
Chicago-born filmmaker Prashant Bhargava was out making the festival rounds with his feature-length debut, Patang, or, The Kite. The filmmaker grew up on the South Side. The Kite is a journey to his homeland – India – offers a glimpse into an annual kite flying festival and some tense family dynamics. The film will premier locally Tuesday night - at the Chicago International Film Festival. Bhargava will be present at the Chicago screenings and joined Eight Forty-Eight to talk about his film.


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Alaveteli is our platform for anyone who wants to run their own Freedom of Information website. It's what underpins our own site, WhatDoTheyKnow, and it's open source software available for anyone, in any part of the world, to use.
Over the past few weeks, we've been making improvements to Alaveteli – the aim is to make it as easy as possible to install and use.
You'll now find that – as well as a snazzy new look for the Alaveteli site – there's much better documentation and installation instructions. We've also consolidated documentation into one place, and we're working through it all, making sure that everything in there is completely up to date.
In short, if you've been thinking about running your own Right To Know site, there's no better time to get started! The Alaveteli community are standing by to help you – and the documentation's never been clearer.
The right conference, held at the right time and attended by people with common problems, can sometimes give birth to whole new organisations. I was at OpenTech when the Open Rights Group was born, and on a grander scale the Red Cross and the UN both featured conferences at catalytic moments in their early history.
Last week in Santiago, Chile, a conference took place that felt like exactly such a moment – PoplusCon. People from 27 countries spent two days talking about their shared goals and desires, and from it the skeleton of a new federation – the Poplus federation – started to take shape.
Not everyone at the conference worked on identical projects, or had identical skills. Some people were specialists in tracking suspicious relationships ('This guy's brother-in-law gets all the contracts'), others were big into training journalists how to use FOI, others specialised in making important datasets more accessible to members of the public, others still were journalists, skilled at constructing stories. But one theme emerged pretty quickly – people wanted better, easier, more reliable ways of sharing knowledge and sharing technology, so that they could all save time, effort and money.
What could a new federation do for you?
And so that is how the conversation turned to the idea of founding a new federation – an organisation that could serve the needs of many different groups without being run or owned by any one of them. In a brainstorm session about what people wanted from a new federation, the following ideas were raised:
- Running events to facilitate more sharing of ideas and tech
- Publishing stories about successful and unsuccessful projects, especially where those stories need to cross language barriers to spread
- Vetting and endorsing data standards
- Access to a community of peers (for sharing experience, encouragement, tips and tricks etc)
- Resources for projects that are running short
- Help and advice on making projects sustainable
- Certification of what counts as a Poplus Component
- Where groups face common challenges, perhaps coordinate advocacy
- Organisation of mentorship, exchanges and placements
This wish list is clearly far more than a nascent organisation could arrange in the near future, but there was some informal voting and the top priorities fairly quickly emerged. People really wanted access to their peers, and to the stories that they tell. And there was a strong wish to see Poplus Components become more official, and better explained.
Getting Real – Getting Involved
But a list is just a list without people willing to make it real. And so without doubt the most awesome thing that took place at PoplusCon was that eight people immediately volunteered to form a committee that would bring Poplus into being, representing half a dozen countries in different parts of the world.
This committee, which is completely open for anyone to join, will be meeting a couple of times in the next few weeks to agree on a plan for the first 12 months of the Poplus federation. It will work out how the new-born federation should govern itself, and what the first things that this entirely volunteer-run group should be doing. It's an exciting, fragile moment and I've not seen anything like it in my ten-odd years working in this field. There's no boss, no leader, just some people trying to build something of shared value.
Right now there are no rules, no barriers to entry, no bureaucracy. In fact there's nothing but some hope, enthusiasm and some shared dreams of a stronger community of individuals and organisations.
I hope that if you read this and think that Poplus sounds cool, that you'll consider joining the committee too. All you have to do is join the mailing list and ask where and when to show up. If you come to online committee meetings a couple of times, you're de facto one of the people who runs Poplus. What happens next is – quite literally – down to you.
Interested in civic coding, open data and eDemocracy?
Then come and join mySociety for a chat, beer and pizza at the Founders Hub in Cardiff on Wednesday 2nd April!
We'll be joined by guest speakers:
Sam Knight: Founder and developer of Your Senedd and Labour Councillor for Cathays.
Your Senedd was launched in 2011 and aims to make the Welsh Assembly more accessible to the public by providing information on all Assembly Members and publishing all Assembly debates. Sam will be chatting about his motivations behind setting up Your Senedd and the development process.
Daniele Procida: Daniele manages Cardiff University's School of Medicine's website, and the applications that publish it. These include Arkestra and other open-source Python/Django applications.
Come along to hear Daniele's talk "The bodiless head of the programmer".
He'll also be around to chat about his work on django CMS and encouraging others to contribute to open source software.
When: Wednesday 2nd April, drop in any time between 6pm and 9pm
Where: The Founders Hub, 119 St Mary Street, Cardiff, CF10 1DY
How: Add your name to the Lanyrd page: http://lanyrd.com/2014/mysocial-2-april/, so we know you're coming.
Who: Anyone who fancies it.
NB: Look out for the mySociety hoodie (they look like this, only usually with a person inside). Watch our Twitter stream on @mySociety to check for last minute advice about where we are sitting or if we have moved venues for unforseen reasons.
Photo by [Duncan] (CC)
Transcripts – the written records of who says what in a conversation – aren't sexy.
However, they can be very important, or even historic. They can reveal big plans that will affect lots of people, and they are a basic requirement of political accountability.
But the way in which transcripts are made available online today doesn't reflect this importance. They tend to be published as hundreds of PDFs, and look more or less like they were made in the 1950s.
We think that the people who are affected by the decisions and plans announced in transcribed meetings deserve better.
What is SayIt?
SayIt is an open source tool for publishing speeches, discussions and dialogues, simply and clearly, online. Search functionality is built in, you can link to any part of a transcript, and the whole thing works nicely on mobile devices.
SayIt can be used either as a hosted service, or it can be built directly into your own website, as a Django app. Here are some examples of what it looks like in its hosted, standalone form:
The Leveson Inquiry – An investigation into press ethics (did you know Hugh Grant's middle name?)
The Charles Taylor trial – The former president of Liberia is tried for crimes against humanity in an epic seven year trial
The complete works of Shakespeare – as a demonstration of SayIt's flexibility in handling different kinds of transcript
However, SayIt's main purpose is to be built into other sites and apps. We don't have a live demo of this today, but one of our international partners will soon be launching a new Parliamentary Monitoring site which uses SayIt to publish years of parliamentary transcripts.
SayIt is also 100% open data compatible, and we use a cut-down version of the Akoma Ntoso open standard for data import.
What isn't SayIt?
SayIt is:
Not a site full of data curated and uploaded by mySociety – it's a tool for redeployment all over the net. We'll host deployments where that's helpful to people, though.
Not primarily about Britain – whilst we're a social enterprise based in the UK, SayIt has been built with an international perspective. We hope it will serve the needs of people watching politicians in places like Kenya and South Africa.
Not solely a mySociety project – it's actually an international collaboration, via the Poplus network (see more below).
Not (yet) a tool to replace Microsoft Word as the way you write down transcripts in the first place. This is coming as we move from Alpha to Beta, though.
Why are we building SayIt?
SayIt is one of the Poplus Components. Poplus is a global collaboration of groups that believe it is currently too difficult and expensive to build effective new digital tools to help citizens exert power over institutions.
Poplus Components are loosely joined tools, mostly structured as web services, that can be used to radically decrease the development time of empowerment sites and apps.
SayIt is the newest component, and aims to reduce the difficulty and cost of launching services that contain transcripts – in particular websites that allow people to track the activities of politicians. Using SayIt or other Poplus components you can build your site in whatever language and framework suits your wishes, but save time by using the components to solve time-consuming problems for you.
The founders of Poplus are FCI in Chile, and mySociety in the UK – and we are hoping that the launch of SayIt will help grow the network. The project has been made possible by a grant from Google.org, while early iterations were aided by the Technology Strategy Board.
Interested in publishing transcripts via SayIt? Here's what to do…
Having taken a look at the demos, we hope at least some of you are thinking 'I know of some transcripts that would be better if published like this'.
If you are interested, then there are two approaches we'd recommend:
If you're a coder, or if you have access to technical skills, read about how to convert your data into the open standard we use. Then talk to us about how to get this data online.
If you don't have access to technical skills, get in touch about what you're interested in publishing, and we'll explore the options with you.
Note to coders – We've not yet spent a lot of time making SayIt easy to deploy locally, so we know it may be a challenge. We're here to help.
Where might SayIt help?
SayIt comes from a desire to publish the speeches of politicians. But we know that there are many other possible uses, which is why we built the Shakespeare demo.
We think SayIt could be useful for publishing and storing transcripts of:
Local council meetings
Court hearings
Election hustings
Academic research interviews and focus groups
Academic seminars, lectures, etc
Market research focus groups
Historic archives of events such as a coronation or key debate
These are just a few of our ideas, but we bet you have others – please do tell us in the comments below.
What's coming next
At the moment, SayIt only covers publishing transcripts, not creating them. Needless to say, this lack of an authoring interface is a pretty big gap, but we are launching early (as an Alpha) because we want to know how you'll use it, what features you want us to build, and what doesn't work as well as we anticipated. We also want to see if we can attract other people to co-develop the code with us, which is the real spirit of the Poplus network.
We'll also be adding the ability to subscribe to alerts so that you'll get an email every time a keyword occurs (just as you can on our other websites, such as FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow). This feature will come into its own for ongoing series of transcripts such as council meetings.
Image by Columbia Phonograph Co. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
This month we released a new version of FixMyStreet. Amongst the new features, fixes, and thingamajigs were some small improvements added by two volunteers, Andrew and Andy.
Even though these are not core pieces of functionality — in fact, precisely because they are not — we want to draw your attention to why they were included, and why this is a Very Good Thing. And perhaps, if you're a coder who wants to put something into an Open Source project but hasn't quite found a way in, Andrew and Andy's work will nudge you into becoming a contributor too.
One of the axioms of Open Source is that, because anyone can read the source code, in theory anyone can contribute to it. In practice, though, it's not really as simple as that. Both ends of the "anyone can contribute" idea require effort:
- Before contributing to a project of any complexity (as we hope you want to do), there's often a lot to learn, or figure out, before any work can even begin;
- Before accepting contributions to such a project (keen as we are to do so), there's an overhead of testing, checking, and managing the incoming code.
The ugly real world
The basic issue here is that software is complex — no matter how well-written, tested and documented program code is, if the problem it's solving is in the real world, it's not going to be simple.
This is especially true of anything used by the public, because often you can only make things seem simple at the front (such as a clean web interface or "user journey") by working hard behind the scenes with data structures and processes that handle the underlying complexity. It's inevitably true of any projects which have been developed over time — programmers like to use the term "legacy code" to describe anything that wasn't written then way they'd choose to write it now.
Often the problems that software is solving are not quite as obvious as they first appear. At mySociety we've got a wealth of experience and actual usage data that ultimately changes the way we build, and develop, our platforms. We understand the fields we work in well (technically, the nerds like to call these the "problem domain"), whether it's governmental practice or civic user behaviour, and that's often knowledge that's not encapsulated anywhere in the program code.
Furthermore, any established platform must protect against the risk that new changes break old behaviour — something that regression testing is designed to catch. This is especially important on platforms like FixMyStreet or Alaveteli where the software is already running in multiple installations.
This is why we have a team of full-time, experienced, and (thanks to our rigorous recruitment process) talented programmers who can invest the time and effort to be familiar with all these things when they set to work coding.
But this builds up to an impediment: sensitivity to any of these issues is enough to make anyone think twice about simply forking our code and starting to hack on it for us.
How it sometimes works
In practice, then, how does anything get contributed? How come it doesn't all get written by our own coders?
The answer is, of course, we do work with major contributors outside our own team (have a look at the activity on our github repos to see them) — but it always requires a period of support and on-line discussion both before and during the process. There's also the business of testing, and sometimes politely pushing back on, pull requests (which is how code contributions are submitted). But the fact of the matter is that this is only possible for people who are willing to spend time familiarising themselves with the specific code, technologies, and practices that we're using on that project. These tend to be hard-code devs, and — here's the point — they're always experienced Open-Sourcers: this will never be the first time they've worked on such a project.
Which is where the little features come in.
The joy of small
We noticed this problem — that contributing code to our projects is simply not easy for us or for contributors. Importantly, it's not just us: it's Open Source everywhere. But we can't simply dismiss the opportunity for contribution. We want to encourage coders to do this, because we believe that Open Source is intrinsically a good thing.
We do two things to make it easier to contribute:
- We identify small features that a coder can approach without a full understanding of the code and the problem domain;
- We help people (like you!) get started by opening up a laptop at our weekly meetups.
The first of these seems obvious now: when we add issues (an idea for a new feature, or maybe a bugfix) to our github repos, if we think they're candidates for manageable, isolated work, we tag them with the label: Suitable for volunteers (like this).
Often these turn out to be "nice-to-haves" that one of our full-time devs can't be pulled off more pressing problems to add just now. (Case in point: Andrew added a date-picker to the FixMyStreet admin stats page, and three of our own staff had stumbled upon and applauded the difference it had made within a week of it going live).
It means it's much easier for you to get involved, because often it's a little, isolated piece of code. And it's much more manageable for us, because the change you'll be submitting is also isolated.
So if you're looking for something to tackle, pick one of those issues, and let us know (just to check nobody else has baggsied it already). Fork the repo, cut the code, write the tests, submit a pull request!
But wait — if that last paragraph made you gulp, here's the second thing we do: meetups. Of course, this is less helpful if you can't make it to London on Wednesdays, but the concept is sound. Put simply, if there is a barrier to entry to diving in, and if one-on-one time with a dev, and some pizza, is what it takes to overcome that, it's time well spent for you to come and see us.
Not 100% confident with git? Not sure when
db/schema.sqlgets used or how we like to handle migrations? No problem: we're happy to guide you.
If this has struck a chord with you — you'd love to be an Open Source contributor one day, and you think mySociety projects make the world a better place — perhaps you should take a poke in our repos, or come along to a meetup. Start small, but do start.
Oh, and Andrew and Andy — thanks guys 😉
More about volunteering for mySociety
Photo by Matt Katzenberger (CC)
For an organisation whose members normally work from home, we've been pretty sociable recently, with meet-ups, conferences, and our annual retreat. We're glad to discover that we haven't actually lost the ability to communicate face to face…
If you'd like to come and sample our sharply honed social skills for yourselves, there are a number of opportunities still to come.
Every Wednesday: London meet-ups
[Above : mySociety designer Jed, chilling in front of the Mozilla Firefox]
If you're in London, do feel free to drop by and say hello, any Wednesday from 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm. We meet at the Mozilla London space – and there are often other interesting things going on too.
Meet-ups are not just for coders – they're for anyone who would like to talk more about mySociety projects or the wider eDemocracy field. On October 30th, we're tying in with the Open Government Partnership event; you're welcome to attend then or any other week.
Fancy coming along? Add your name to our Lanyrd pages here.
[Above: Our meet-ups are not always this busy! On this night, we happened to coincide with a Mozfest planning event.. speaking of which, see below]
25th – 27th October: Mozfest
Mozfest in Ravensbourne, London, is Mozilla's annual innovative open web event for 'technologists and creators'.
The event kicks off on the night of Friday 25th with a Science Fair. We'll be there, showing our wares – in this case, we'll be hoping to meet many of the internatonal attendeees and let them know about our open source software. But if you're not an international attendee, you should totally swing by and say hello too.
30th October: Edinburgh
The next non-London mySociety meet-up will be in Edinburgh – watch this blog, our Twitter stream and Facebook page for details of precisely where (it'll be a nice, central pub that serves food… suggestions are welcome).
That's in advance of our attendance at the Channel Shift conference – but you don't have to be a council employee to drop in. Come and share a pint and have a chat, whichever aspect of our work interests you.
20th November: Online Information conference
mySociety's Director Tom will be giving the keynote presentation at the Online Information conference, the theme of which is "adapting to disruptive technologies and creating value with people, platforms and information". Feel free to grab Tom afterwards for a chat!
4th December: Manchester
As with Edinburgh, we're pitching up in Manchester for a Channel Shift conference, and will be taking the opportunity to mingle with lovely locals the night before. Again, pub suggestions are more than welcome.
We hope to see you soon at one of these events. And, if you're wondering what we look like, well, you're in luck. At our recent retreat we took a photo of the entire team (plus a few guests). Here we are in all our glory – click to see a larger version, if you dare.
Thanks to everyone who dropped into last night's meet-up: we hope you had a good time. From our point of view, it was a fine mix of technical and social, with just as much chatting as coding.
mySociety's developers Mark and Dave, project manager Ben, and director Tom were on hand, and there were plenty of new folk, who'd come along simply to find out more about mySociety and the work we do.
Dave reports:
Quite often these discussions spill over into the whole Open Source world and how that works. After all, we're at the Mozilla London space because we're part of that sector, and Mozilla are a great example of people who generously share their (splendid) resources to make wonderful things happen in the tech community.
Meanwhile, Andrew continued to chip away at issues on FixMyStreet, and we also enjoyed Viktoria's impromptu explanation of how graphene works (she works with it) by ingeniously using the Moz space's hexagonal-patterned flooring.
These meet-ups are open to everyone. So whether you're an open source veteran, or just a curious newbie who is bemused to discover that there is such a thing as free software – if you're interested in anything you see on mysociety.org, please come along.
Every Wednesday, 6:00 -9:00 pm. Sign up here.
Photo by Michael Statham (CC)
We love to hear that someone has taken our code and is launching a new website. But it is even better to see that site become fully established.
How can you tell when a site has reached that milestone? Hard to say – but we reckon that processing over 1,000 Freedom of Information requests is a pretty good sign that an Alaveteli install has succeeded.
Ki Mit Tud in Hungary passed that mark back in April; in Spain, Tu Derecho A Saber has also dealt with just over 1,000 requests. And in New Zealand, FYI.org.nz is also celebrating the big thou, under the care of Rowan Crawford.
We made Alaveteli to be used in any jurisdiction, no matter what Freedom of Information laws are in place, and no matter what the prevailing culture – and we are always fascinated to know how the resulting sites are impacting their respective communities. When it comes to New Zealand, some aspects are familiar; some are distinct to the region.
Rowan was kind enough to tell us a little about how it's been, watching those first thousand FOI requests roll through FYI.org.nz.
How is it running the site? Do you have a volunteer team helping you, like we do with WhatDoTheyKnow in the UK?
- "It's just me at the moment — it hasn't been a high burden at all. Generally things "just work".
- "As the Admin, I do get unusual questions directed at me sometimes, that strain my knowledge of the law. Fortunately I have several lawyer contacts on Twitter I can run to for help!"
Is there anything we should know about the background to FOI in NZ?
"The Official Information Act came in to force almost exactly thirty years ago, on 1 July 1983. It is used extensively, though just how much is hard to say.
"The only body which reports OIA statistics is the Ombudsman, which only reports the numbers of complaints – about 1200 in 2012. I know journalists use it routinely."
How has NZ reacted to having its own Right To Know site?
"The response from people using it has been very, very positive. The press haven't covered it that much, but bloggers have. One measure of success is that it has its own section in the Ombudsman's FAQ.
Can you recall any particularly noteable requests that have gone through the site?
"I have an affection for a couple of successful ones from the police: they replied to one request with their interrogation manual, and to another with information on how much they paid informants."
How are you finding Alaveteli?
"Installing it has improved hugely since the first time I tried. The current method of theming works pretty well, too.
"There are several things on my road map: integrating documentcloud instead of the current HTML conversion, using S3 for resources, and a mobile version."
What kind of user numbers are you seeing?
"There are just under 500 users registered in the system, and we're getting 5,000 unique visitors a month. It's growing month by month by about 15% at the moment — who knows how long that will keep up!"
Run a Freedom of Information website
Rowan makes it look pretty easy!
We won't pretend that you can run a Freedom of Information site with no effort at all, but we have made it as simple as we possibly can. We have the code, we have the documentation, and most important of all, we have a community waiting to give you support and advice.
If you're interested in finding out more, drop us a line at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Today, we are using the phrase "Alaveteli upgrade" rather a lot – and not just because it's such a great tongue-twister. It's also a notable milestone for our open-source community.
Alaveteli is the software that underlies WhatDoTheyKnow, our Freedom of Information website. The code can also be deployed by people in other countries who wish to set up a similar site. If you're a 'front-end user', someone who just uses WhatDoTheyKnow to file or read FOI requests, this upgrade will go unnoticed… assuming all goes well at our end, that is. But if you're a developer who'd like to use the platform in your own country, it makes several things easier for you.
Alaveteli will now be using the Rails 3 series – the series we were previously relying on, 2, has become obsolete. One benefit is that we're fully supported by the core Rails team for security patches. But, more significant to our aim of sharing our software with organisations around the world, it makes Alaveteli easier to use and easier to contribute to. It's more straightforward to install, dependencies are up-to-date, code is clearer, and there's good test coverage – all things that will really help developers get their sites up and running without a problem.
Rails cognoscenti will be aware that series 4.0 is imminent – and that we've only upgraded to 3.1 when 3.2 is available. We will be upgrading further in due course – it seemed sensible to progress in smaller steps. But meanwhile, we're happy with this upgrade! The bulk of the work was done by Henare Degan and Matthew Landauer of the Open Australia Foundation, as volunteers – and we are immensely grateful to them. Thanks, guys.
Find the Alaveteli code here – or read our guide to getting started.
Image credit: Sashi Manek (cc)
This is the third of our recent series of Open311 blog posts: we started by explaining why we think Open311 is a good idea, and then we described in a non-techie way how Open311 works. In this post we'll introduce our proposed extension to Open311, and show how we use it in FixMyStreet.
The crux of our suggested improvement is this: normal people want to know what has happened to their problem, and Open311 currently isn't good enough at telling them whether or not it has been dealt with. To be more specific, our additions are all about reports' status change, by which we mean something like this:
That pothole?
I just totally fixed it.
That's robot-311 from the previous post, if you've dropped in here without reading the previous posts. Once again we're blurring the distinction between client and user (the girl you'll see below) a little, to make things simpler to follow.
Every month in the UK, thousands of problems are reported on www.fixmystreet.com and, moments later, sent on to the councils who will fix them. Here's what happens with a problem report for something like a pothole or a flickering streetlight:
- You create the report on FixMyStreet.
- FixMyStreet sends that report to the right department at the right council.
- That body puts it into its own back-end system.
- Later, when the council fixes the problem, FixMyStreet is updated, and everyone knows it's fixed.
On the face of it, you might think we need only care about 1 and 2. But really, FixMyStreet isn't just about dispatching reports, it's about helping to get things like potholes actually fixed. And neither citizens nor local governments benefit if work gets done but nobody finds out about it – which is part 4 on the list above.
What do we mean by "status change"?
The example at the top of the page shows the robot effectively changing a problem's status to "fixed".
Actually, statuses can be simple, such as either OPEN or CLOSED, or more detailed, such as "under investigation", "crew has been dispatched", "fixed", and so on. But since we're only concerned here with the status changing, that specific vocabulary deployed doesn't really matter – it can be anything.
In situations where FixMyStreet is not integrated with council systems (i.e we just send email problem reports) FixMyStreet problems still frequently get marked as fixed, because anyone can change the status of a report just by visiting the page and clicking the button. Obviously, though, we prefer to have FixMyStreet directly connected to the local government back-end databases, so that news of a fixed report can be automatically bubbled from the back-office up into FixMyStreet and out onto the net.
And here's where the problem lies: Open311 doesn't quite support this business of getting problem updates from the back office out to the public. So first, we'll show you how it can be done today, using Open311, and we'll explain why this isn't a good option. Then we'll show our preferred solution, which we've proposed as an extension.
Looking at everything just to spot one change (bad)
One way to notice if any problems' statuses have changed is to use Open311 to ask for every single service request, and see if any of them have a different status since the last time you checked.
Tell me all the service requests you've ever received
request 981276 the pothole on the corner by Carpenter Street is now CLOSED (I filled in the pothole)
request 988765 the pothole by bus stop on Nigut Road is now CLOSED (I filled in the pothole)
request 998610 gaping hole at the end of Sarlacc Road is now OPEN (the pothole fell through)
request 765533 where the street was cracked outside Taffey's Snake Pit is now CLOSED (I filled in the pothole)
. . .
continues for thousands of requests
Um, OK. Now I'll look at all these and see if any have changed since I last asked *sigh*
Obviously there are some problems with this. Even though Open311 lets you ask for quite specific service requests, you have to ask for all of them, because by definition you don't know which ones might have changed. Remember, too, that problems can potentially change status more than once, so just because it's been marked as CLOSED once doesn't mean it won't become OPEN again later. This exchange is very wasteful, very slow and ultimately (with enough reports) may become de facto impossible.
Asking for just the changes (good)
So here's a better way of doing it. We've actually been doing this for some months, and now seems the time to share.
The client asks the server for just the updates on a regular basis, so any requests that have recently changed get updated on FixMyStreet automatically, usually just a few minutes later.
Have you changed the status of any of service requests today?
Yes, request 981276 was CLOSED at 3 o'clock (I filled in the pothole)
Or, more practically for keeping FixMyStreet up to date:
Have you changed the status of any of service requests in the last 15 minutes?
This is handled by our extension to Open311,
GET Service Request Updates. There's also an optional equivalent call for putting updates into the server (
POST Service Request Update), which would apply if the client changed the status after the service request had been submitted.
Note that the server identifies the problem with its own reference (that is,
981276is the council's reference, not a FixMyStreet ID, for example). This is important because not all these requests necessarily came from this particular client. Remember that all service requests are available through the Open311
GET Service Requestscall anyway (as shown above). So the server doesn't send each service request back in its entirety: just its ID, the new status, when it changed, and a brief description.
In practice the client wouldn't usually ask for "today". In fact, we typically send a request asking for any updates in the last 15 minutes, and then at the end of the day ask for the whole day's updates, just to check none were missed.
The technical bit
From a client's point of view, this is simply an extra call like others in the Open311 API. So it's just a request over HTTP(S) for XML (or JSON, if required).
We deliberately make the client poll the server for updates and pull them in, rather than expecting the server to push updates out. This frees the server from any obligation to track which clients (for there may be more than just one) care about which updates. The requests themselves are sent with unique IDs, allocated by the server, so the client can dismiss duplicates. It's also robust in the event of connection failures, so if there are timeouts or retry logic, that's for the clients to worry about, not the server. Basically, this is all to make it as light on the server as possible: the only real issue is that it must be able to provide a list of updates. This usually means adding a trigger to the database, so that when a problem's status is updated a record of that update is automatically created. It's the table of those "service request update" records that incoming requests are really querying.
We have published our own recommendation of this mechanism, which FixMyStreet already implements, alongside the FixMyStreet codebase.
Is that it?
Yup, that's it.
This extension is in addition to the Open311 specification — it doesn't break existing implementations in any way. Obviously this means FixMyStreet's Open311 implementation is compatible with existing Open311 servers. But we hope that others working on Open311 systems will consider our extension so that clients are kept better informed of the status of the problems being fixed.
Why are statuses so important that it is worth extending the Open311 spec?
mySociety didn't originally build FixMyStreet because we wanted to get potholes fixed. We built it because we wanted nervous, politically inexperienced people to know what it felt like to ask the government to do something, and to be successful at that. We wanted to give people the buzz of feeling like they have a bit of power in this world, even if the most tiny amount.
If the government fixes a problem and the citizen doesn't find out it's a double loss. The citizen becomes disillusioned and weakened, and the government doesn't get the credit it is due. Everyone loses. We think that Open311 is a key mechanism for making large numbers of people feel that the government does respond to their needs. It just needs a bit of an upgrade to do it better. We hope very much that the wider community tests and endorses our extensions, and it can be folded in to the next official version of the Open311 standard.