Gareth Shapiro London Based Flex/AS3 Freelance Web Developer

A recent trend within the UK government is one of providing access to the data sets they hold to the public. It appears to me at least that the thinking behind this is that transparency is promoted, the public may well come up with ways of using the data that are useful to everyone, and after all the public has paid for the creation of these data sets and so it seems correct that they should have access to it.

Not too long ago I attended a meeting at London's amazing city hall which focused on the Greater London Authority's contribution to this movement, The London Datastore. For someone like myself who develops compelling rich interactive digital media for a living it was obvious that here is a rich source of potential to tell a story using this data and Flash / Flex.

Booz and Company are an international business management firm with clients and consultants stationed around the globe. A large part of what they do is develop, collate and distribute business expertise. Digital media has obvious benefits over traditional distribution models for content such as this and the rich interactive experience made possible using Flash enhances the impact and enjoyment of the ideas and messages for everyone who experience them.

You did read correctly. That does say "Hack" and "The Government" in one sentence.

People often misuse the word hack. It originally meant "to solve problem" and a group of developers, designers and statisticians got together in London over the weekend to solve the "What cool things can you build with publicly accessible government data?" question.

Being a Flash and Flex programmer naturally I thought it might be good idea to do an interactive data visualisation of some sort.

Isn't it great when digital work lasts longer than 5 min? I recently updated a piece I did exactly a year ago for The Economist's annual World In project.

Underwired are a London based ECRM strategy and execution agency.

Recently they produced their first Flash site but being specialists in digital relationship marketing, retention and email marketing and not Actionscript, it was not running as well as it should. I restructured their site so that it would load quickly while maintaining the clever HTML/Javascript/PHP code they had written to maintain some search engine readable HTML on each page.

Christmas seems to come around so quickly. One minute you are enjoying long summer days in the park and the next thing you know you are building Flash based shopping cart applications for Christmas promotions. Where does the time go?

The first part of this week was spent in Brighton attending the 2009 edition of Flash on the Beach. I had heard good things about it and I was not disappointed. I have come away feeling injected with inspiration, something that had been replaced by fatigue after some demanding deadlines recently. This is filed under 'Work'. I am not sure it should be, it was way too much fun.

Due to business details behind this website I am unable to say for exactly which luxury fashion brand this work was for. It's a shame really because they are well known in UK and Europe for their dresses, suits, sunglasses and especially men and woman's perfume ranges.

On the plus side I had an amazing time working on this website with some really cool people. The Project Manager, Amell Benzerfa, on the job agreed to say some words about my work that I can share with you here....

At the end of 2008 I worked on a Flash project for The Economist called 'The World in 2009'. There was a graphic designer who was responsible for producing a world map vector and I wired it all up.

As you can imagine this artwork was intricate. Each country had a border and a background colour that were separate objects, some text fields for labels, and as you would expect also grouped into continents. The designer was using Adobe Illustrator to create the vector shapes and importing these into Flash and sending me the .fla

The process was not very smooth. There were changes to the artwork of course, Illustrator does not create MovieClips in the same way that you would manually and also when dealing with such an complex piece, old fashioned user error creeps in.

The World in 2009 is the 23rd edition of The Economist's annual collection of predictions for the year ahead—with views from journalists, politicians and business people.

This year's edition has two interactive online pieces looking at Countries and Industries in 2009. I was responsible for all the Actionscript and PHP coding.