Rewired State has taken another step towards becoming the next generation systems integrator for government.  In a piece of delightful recursion, a Rewired State project becomes the vehicle for accessing the formal status of Rewired State – or as it has been since last Monday, Rewired State Ltd.
Companies Open House - Rewired State - Recursion
In other news, the Rewired State gang has just announced their plans for March 2010.  Last year’s National Hack the Government Day still sticks in my mind as something of a personal turning point.  It was the first time I got a sense of the energy and opportunity represented by that community, and as I summed it up in my account of the day:

The simple fact that lots of smart people thought the best thing they could do with their Saturday was to think really hard about how to make government better is a force for good we cannot afford to lose.

This year, that’s just one of four events being run under the Rewired State banner.  What’s really interesting is what appears to be an entirely non-accidental absence of any sense of groundhog day.  The world has moved on in the last year – for which the Rewired State crew can take some of the credit.  The question is no longer, can bright people do smart things with government data?  That is proven beyond challenge.  The question now is how those ideas can break through from demonstrator and prototype to robust and scalable service, and from services which are available and potentially useful to services which are used and celebrated.  So it is really interesting to see that two of the four events involve paying developers to tackle specific problems while still leaving plenty of space for the more anarchic hack day itself.

I have got a longer post I had been writing over the last few days on some of these issues before any of this was announced, which should see the light of day imminently.  But since I am absolutely unqualified actually to take part in Rewired State (the last time I did anything which looked at all like coding was in 1987, and it wasn’t many years before that that I learned error correction by hand punching paper tape…), it can’t be too soon to start blagging for a seat at the presentations.

Responses

Comments are closed.