Matthew Somerville's COVID-19 lockdown tool
Channel: British Computer Society Open Source Specialists
Date: 2021-03-19

Presented by Matthew Somerville

During the second half of 2020, various parts of the UK found themselves under various different sorts of local restrictions, which changed regularly. Originally done with a huge list of postcodes, then resolving to council and ward areas, these confusing, complicated changes lacked a straightforward way of finding out the current restrictions where you were. So I wrote a postcode lookup tool to look up local restrictions, which ended up being mentioned in Parliament. This talk will look at the open data behind the legislation and my tool, and some of the problems and issues faced.

Matthew Somerville is a senior web developer based in Birmingham. With mySociety, he is involved in many of the UK’s best known civic websites, such as FixMyStreet and TheyWorkForYou. Finding that there didn’t appear to be a comprehensive IMDb-style site for the theatre, he created Theatricalia, an online database of theatre productions. His bookmarkable version of the National Rail website provides constant positive karma, and his live map of the London Underground was described as “what IT was invented for” and “possibly the coolest use of the internet”. Outside of the internet and his house, he used to sing with the City of Birmingham Choir, and play violin in the South Birmingham Sinfonia, and hopes to do so again.