#iSoc12 Labs For VDAB
Hi there, all!
Just two weeks ago Miet called me. She —as the first iRail employee— was looking for a project manager for a last-minute project. Lieven Janssen from OKFN Belgium and the ‘we open data’-movement arranged a collaboration with VDAB. For those of you who are not familiar with the VDAB, it is the public employment service of Flanders. The innovation unit inside VDAB thinks opening up job data is a good way for them to reach their goals, and they would love to convince the rest of VDAB of this.
Enter OKFN & iRail.
With a small budget, they wanted an external company to prove you can build apps with their open data. In particular, apps that would never be developed by VDAB, because of budgetary reasons. The goal was to prepare a presentation for the board of directors in which we showcase one or more applications as a proof of concept. We were provided with 5000 open vacancies. To succeed in our mission, we first figured out what kind of apps that might not be a priority for VDAB: apps built for minorities and apps that focus on playification. The first would be a website accessible for blind people, or a job website for a niche market. Building a website for blind people might seem to be easy, except for some guidelines (in dutch), but a small concept is being drawn out as we speak.
The latter: a web-app to make searching for a job more playful? We didn’t build the world’s most exciting job applying platform, but completing my own curriculum vitae has never been more rewarding than when we made SMAIL (pronounce like ‘smile’ in English). However, we do apologize in advance. The job data are not open data yet, for legitimate reasons, so there is no way to find out exactly how rewarding it would feel for you. But please enjoy the screenshots:
All credits to Michael and Jeppe! After coding smail in just over 2 working days, they are now (14/09/2012) competing in the Apps For Flanders student hackathon, as a dedicated team for VDAB.
During these days we also tested some new features of The DataTank version 1.2.0 to be sure it is/was bug free for Apps For Flanders. And after just a few weeks of collecting feedback, we will be presenting our achievements to VDAB’s board of directors. Let’s hope for a positive outcome for open data!
