Liverpool Science Park News & Press

alpha.gov.uk uses Scraperwiki, a cutting edge data-gathering tool, to deliver
the results that citizens want. And radically for government, rather than
tossing a finished product out onto the web with a team of defenders, this is
an experiment in customer engagement.

If you're looking renew your passport, find out about student loans or how to
complete a tax returns, it's usually easier to use Google than navigate through
government sites. That was the insight for director of the Alphagov project
Tom Loosemore, and his team of developers. This is a government project run
by government.

Alpha.gov.uk is not a traditional website, it's a developer led but citizen
focused experiment to engage with government information.
It abandons the direct.gov.uk approach of forcing you to think the way they
thought, instead it provides a simple "ask me a question" interface and learns
from customer journeys, starting with the first 80 of the most popular
searches that led to a government website.

But how would they get information from all those Government website sites
into the new system?Tom Loosemore from alpha.gov.uk says "Without the dynamic approach that
Scraperwiki offers we would have had to rely on writing lots of redundant code
to scrape the websites and munch together the different datasets. Normally
that would have taken our developers a significant amount of time, would
have been a lot of hassle and would have been hard to maintain. Hence we
were delighted to use ScraperWiki, it was the perfect tool for what we needed.
It avoided a huge headache"

ScraperWiki CEO Francis Irving says "It's fantastic to see Government
changing its use of the web to make it less hassle for citizens. Just as
developers need data in an organised form to make new applications from it,
so does Government itself. ScraperWiki is an efficient way to maintain lots of
converters for data from diverse places, such as Alpha.gov.uk have here from
many Government departments. This kind of data integration is a pattern
we're seeing, meeting people's expectations for web applications oriented
around the user getting what they want done fast. I look forward to seeing the
Alpha.gov.uk project rolling out fully - if only so I can renew my passport
without having to read lots of text first!"