The background is that I love to know what is happening in the world of Open Data, but there are so many people doing so many things in a diffuse environment that it is difficult to know where to look in order to keep up with the latest developments.

Separately, I’ve been playing with IFTTT (If This Then That) which is an incredibly powerful way of plumbing web accounts together to do some clever things.

So, here is an experiment that I’ve been playing with. If you want to follow it, to make your own project then you’ll need three things:

• An IFTTT Account
• A Twitter Account, and
• A Readitlater account. This is a very flexible tool that allows you to save articles, links etc and view them alter on any device.

All are free, and the links above will take you to the sign-up pages. You can be up in running in minutes. Once signed up, you can follow the steps below.

My first task was to create task in IFTTT to search all or Twitter and find who is tweeting about #opendata. Luckily someone had already set up a similar task in IFTTT.  On that site, shared tasks are called recipes, and you can copy a pre-existing recipe.

Here is the recipe you want: http://ifttt.com/recipes/7540

Once you’re logged into IFTTT, just follow the recipe, and, under Step 1, enter the search term you’re interested in. In my case that was #opendata. Then, under step two, leave the first field as suggested then go to the second field and enter the name of the Twitter list you want to use.

Once you click Create Task, the event will fire every 15 minutes and each time, if it finds a new user tweeting about #opendata it will add them to your Twitter list.

So, you’re now building up a list of people who tweet about a specific topic – whcih might in itself be useful for those setting up hashtags for events, hackdays or conferences.

At this stage, before we move one, you might want to go to your Twitter account and add a user manually to the list just so there is something there to work with.

Now that that is set up and working you can set about searching the Twitter stream for that list and pulling out what people are saying about Open Data.  To do that you need to grab the RSS feed of the list. This is more difficult than you might expect – and certainly harder than it used to be with the ‘old’ Twitter.

However, someone has been through the pain for you already. You’ll find the details here on David Calhoun’s blog.

I found the method suggested by Pete Carrol on that page the most straightforward.

Go to a link such as this: http://api.twitter.com/1/lists.xml?screen_name=scibella

but change the screen_name to your own.

From that you’ll get back some XML with one or more <list> items. If there is more than one <list>, choose the ID of the one you want.

then use this link:

http://api.twitter.com/1/lists.xml?user_id=51496296 but substituting the ID for the one for you list

That is the feed for your Twitter list identified. Now, copy that link and head back to IFTTT and to another recipe – this time one that I created to search a Twitter list for a specific hashtag, and push the results to a Readitlater account. Here it is: http://ifttt.com/recipes/19356

Follow the instructions there and you’re done.

You’ve now be searching for the hashtag that you’re interested, from the Twitter list you set up to monitor who chats about it on Twitter. The results will be available in your Readitlater account.

Since I set this up yesterday the experiment has worked. My Twitter list of those who’ve tweeted about #opendata is growing.  Also, the task search the Twitter list for mentions of #opendata is working, and the tweets have been pushed to my Readitlater account allowing me to read them on my mobile phone. That said the IFTTT log shows that its been throwing up some errors as API seems to have failed a few times over night. I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

Also, you could adapt the latter recipe and push the alerts to mail, SMS or to other clipping services using the built in channels in IFTTT.

If you find this useful – or have comments on it, please leave comments below.

Ian

The scatterplot diagram below shows the same data as in part one of this article but with the data for Essex removed for ease of plotting. Doing so means the spread of data is more easily visualised.

One might have expected a fairly linear distribution of data from bottom left, sloping upward to the top right somewhere, with bubble sizes (representing web team sizes) starting small at the bottom left and getting bigger as we move right and up. However this is not true. One of the largest bubbles is for Fylde council, down in the bottom left.

If you now move to the third part of this article, I’ll plot only the data for the comparator group that I selected for Aberdeen City Council.

The Scatterplot diagram below shows only the data for the Aberdeen City Council and its six comparator councils. These were chosen as they are local authorities having both a local population and council FTE size within +/- 25% of that of Aberdeen.

So the clustering is understandable – but the the variation of team sizes, reflected in the bubble size is remarkable. Watch out for Falkirk and South Tyneside whose bubbles are almost exactly aligned. if you can’t see one or other trying refreshing the page (F5) as a jitter function moves the dots around a little.

I posted the survey on one of the Communities of Practice (COP) run by the IDEA and The Improvement Service in Scotland. The survey was taken up and promoted by SOCITM.

The reason for my running the survey was to benchmark Aberdeen City Council’s web team with those of other authorities. I promised all participants that they get a copy of the data and analysis when I finished.

SOCITM thought that there was merit in what I did and invited me to present at the Website Takeup and Improvement workshop in Birmingham. When I gave my presentation I used both MS Powerpoint and a set of webpages which I’d created using the Protivis javascript framework.

I posted both my MS Powerpoint Presentation and the Excel spreadsheet of original data back on the COP. I promised to share the graphs via my own blog.

When making the promise I hadn’t foreseen the difficulty in getting Protivis to work with WordPress. I’ve now solved that by using the Protovis Loader Plug-in for WordPress.

Once I did that I had to save the Javascript for each graph to a separate JS file and load that to a site directory. Lastly I had to move each of the three graphs to a separate page to get the mouse-over functions to work. If I’d had time I would have worked out a JS function to add commas to the numeric text that loads beneath each graph – but I might return to this later.

In each of the three scatterplot diagrams that I’ve created the council webteam (circle) is plotted against the local population size (y-axis) and the size of the council measured in FTEs (x-axis). The colour of the bubble represents the council type, and the size of the bubble represents the web team size.

The first example below shows the data collected for all councils. Mouseover the bubbles to show which council is which. The data loads below the graph.

Yesterday morning I received another call from Three’s Scottish Executive.  It was the same woman that I’d dealt with the day before, Lorna.

She’s investigated my complaint.

The short version is she’d spoken to the girl in the Three shop in the St Nicholas Centre, Aberdeen who’d sold me the contract and she’d also spoken to the manager of the shop. The salesperson denied selling me the contract / handset on the basis of the process to change numbers to my new phone. The manager was backing her up. [I omitted to mention that the manager had played no part in our discussions and more importantly the final part of the conversation between the saleswoman and myself was witnessed by my wife and heard her go over the steps I needed to follow.]

However the woman at the Scottish Executive believed my version of events. I had by my account far too much information on the process which I could only have learned from someone in the shop.

She agreed that I’d been mis-sold the contract.

I suggested that there were two options

• cancel the contract as mis-sold, or
• sort out getting my new handset working with my old number.

She agreed and was happy to follow either path.

I chose the latter. Cancelling the contract would have meant me looking around for another contract with another network and trying to get my existing number transferred to that. At this stage (almost a month after I took delivery of the Samsung Galaxy S2 and set it up to my satisfaction, I couldn’t face that).

So I opted to stay with them, not through any loyalty – which has evaporated – but through a fear of further frustrating process. She assured me that while there is no process at Three for transferring numbers in the way described to me (as the process was designed to move or ‘port’ numbers between networks) she would get it fixed that day.

I suggested that given the problems I’d faced (and the fact that the shop, with which I’ve dealt with for three years, were now calling me a liar) it would be a nice goodwill gesture for them to write off any outstanding balance on the old contract. She accepted that without question – so at least I don’t have to pay the £36 or so that remained there.

A call back from Three some three hours later confirmed that my number had been transferred, and the outstanding balance of the old contract wiped.

She mentioned that the staff at the store will be dealt with under Three’s internal management processes.

While I am grateful to Lorna for sorting this out to my satisfaction I think it worth reflecting on a few lessons.

• The saleswoman at the Three store in St Nicholas Centre, Aberdeen behaved appallingly – selling me a new contract based on a process which did not exist and in so doing mis-sold the contract. [My wife speculated that the salesperson had a target to meet for the month and so got me to sign up on 30th July to help their sales figures - I've no evidence of this.] She compounded her wrong doings by them calling me a liar to her Customer Service team. I know that in my own organisation this would be investigated and dealt with.
• The manager at the same Three store behaved as badly by believing his employee’s account while not having witnessed the mis-selling. He also failed to return a call after my requesting one when I went back to the shop on 14th August and left a clear message for him.
• I was left struggling badly to sort this out as the Mumbai-based customer service centre were unable to sort out issues such as this.
• The Social Media Team at three were great at contacting me when these matters came to light on Twitter but there was no follow up from the Customer Service people to deal with my complaint for well over a week. This added to the frustration I felt.
• The Scottish Executive team at Three (in the guise of Lorna) were able to sort it out quickly once they’d taken on board what I said – but despite my whole account being posted on this blog they hadn’t read it and I had to repeat the whole story for the umpteenth time. The internal flow of communication between teams could be much better.
• Writing these blog posts and pushing them to Twitter did get my problem noticed and ultimately dealt with. If I hadn’t done that how long would it taken to resolve and how might I have had to do it? As my wife added, how would someone without a blog and Twitter account get their problems sorted out?
• Lastly, Three does not (I’ve been told emphatically) have a process for a customer to buy themselves early out of a contract, take on a new handset and transfer the former number to it. To me that seems crazy and a wasted business opportunity – I know several people in similar positions in my workplace who would love to do exactly that.

So, how do I fill my evenings now……?

When we last left the story, I’d had an email on 22nd August from Three “… We’re looking into this for you and will get in touch within two days to discuss it further….”

The 23rd came and went – no surprise – but so did the 24th.  Still no contact. That did make me wonder if I’d actually hear from them.

Then yesterday morning (25th) at 11:34am I got a phone call from Three’s Scottish Executive Office.

I was staggered that while the person on the phone had been told about my blog, she had no history of my complaint – she’d just come back from maternity leave – and I had to retell it all yet again. I make this the seventh conversation I’ve had with Three’s staff about what my complaint is about.  It is also eleven days since I started trying to resolve the issue.

She promised to investigate what had gone wrong. As we neared the end of the conversation I told her that as a customer what I wanted was an apology for the delay and what I’ve had to endure,  and an assurance that it would be fixed soon.  Once asked for an apology I did get one.

Surely the investigation of failure is secondary – and should drive future process improvement.

I pointed out that if this situation isn’t remedied ASAP then I will go to OFCOM and Trading Standards and register complaints that the contract was mi-sold to me. Significantly she said that she is working on the basis, too, ie that I was mis-sold the contract, and in effect that there is no easy way for a customer on Three to cancel a contract early and move (or port as she called the process)  their number to another handset on Three.  This is an astonishing admission.

She promised to phone back in the afternoon. To her credit she did so but caught me in a meeting in later afternoon. I took the call and explained that I couldn’t talk and asked her to phone back in half an hour.

I await that call this morning.

Eight days after my abortive attempts to get my phone number transferred to my new handset, things are looking more positive.

This morning I had three messages on Twitter from @threeuk, all in quick succession:

“@10_ml You have been waiting 8 days for a call? I hope we have chased CS to contact you?”

“@10_ml Just found out some info ref your complaint..It’s been escalated to our Exec office in Scotland, someone with call within 48 hrs.”

“@10_ml I have found your complaint and it’s now been escalated to our exec. office in Scotland, sorry for the delay, someone will call you.”

This was followed a couple of hours later with “@10_ml Please let me know if you don’t receive a call..”

Meantime an email had arrived from Three’s Executive Office. I’ve blanked some details:

================================================

Executive Office Administrator

=================================================

So, we’re back to where we should have been 7 days ago.

I just hope that the Executive Office can take the necessary steps to sort our my issue and get my old number onto my new handset post haste.

If other networks can do all of this in the shop why does Three have such a palaver?

Ian

Yesterday (Friday) started on a positive note. @rightmobile tried to help.  My reply was picked up by@threeuk who made the right noises: “@10_ml sorry to hear about your bad experience. I’m going to look into this again this morning for you.”

I replied to them “@ThreeUK thanks. I appreciate it. Utterly frustrated by inability to get ny (sic) issue resolved.”

@threeuk came straight back : “@10_ml completely understand – hopefully we can get this sorted asap.”

That was 24 hours ago. Since when, nothing.

I admire whoever is operating the @threeuk account. They monitor what’s being said and make reassuring noises to the customer. That’s great and as it should be – and I feel, when that happens, that someone is taking ownership of my problem. However, the messages aren’t backed up by action from the business end.

My wife suggests that I should give up and get back on the phone – but I’d given up on that route of resolution back last Sunday when it was clear that the staff in Mumbai were powerless to deviate from a fixed process (as I noted in my original post), so when @threeuk customer services weighed-in on Monday I thought things were going to be sorted out for me.

This is the 7th day of my trying to have my original problem resolved and yet I can see no light at the end of the tunnel.

How hard can it be to get a number from on Three contract phone transferred to another Three contract phone when both have the same owner?

On Monday (15th)  I wrote an update on what had happened since that first post. That was posted to Twitter, as are all my blog posts.

Later that evening I got the message from @threeuk “@10_ml Just read your blog, it normally takes CS 48hrs to return a call. I will make sure someone calls you today. Aug 16, 1:13 AM via HootSuite”

So, despite the inaccuracy (I hadn’t called them: they’d asked me to email my details after reading my first post / tweet on this and so, I’d responded with the info at 17:13 on Monday 15th Aug )  I thought I’d wait for the contact rather than confuse things by starting another chain of communication.

I waited all day Tuesday and all day Wednesday until 48 hours since my email had long gone. Also, bear in mind that my email of 15th Aug was not my first approach to them. That started on Sunday 14th when I treid to sort it out first on the phone then in the shop.

At 10:03pm on Wednesday 17th Aug my mobile rang and I accepted the call. It immediately went dead. I tried calling back but went straight through to the general 3 Customer Services number. I hung up as by that time of night I had no strength left to tackle the nonsense of their automated system. I wonder if the dialling and hanging up was a way of fooling the system into logging a call to me? Why did no-one follow up that call again.

Now we’re at Thursday evening (7.40pm as I write this) and still no one has spoken to me about sorting out my original problem which I started complaining about on Monday.

Meantime the promised call from my local shop has not taken place.

I feel I’ve given three a fair chance to sort it out.

My next step is to contact Ofcom and my local trading standards and get them to cancel the contract.  I need a network that looks after their customers and Three is certainly not it.

Watch this space – I have low expectations of Three sorting it out in a positive way without being forced to do so.

Here’s an update one day on.

The promised phone call from my local store didn’t happen.

I did get a jaunty message from Three on Twitter this morning. “Morning – thanks for alerting us to your issues. If you dm me your email, I can get some details & look into this for you.”

So I chalked up a couple of points for them responding to my tweet yesterday.

However, I had to point out to them that unless they followed me I couldn’t DM them my email address. So I took back the points.

I sent my email address and waited for action.  I got an email bakc with an address which I won’t share here asking me for the phone numbers / my own details etc so that they could look into it and asked me to specify which number to contact me on. I emailed them back, giving them the required info and asked them to contact me on my new number as the old one isn’t with me at all times at the moment.

That was three hours ago.

An hour later I got a the first of a series of text messages from Three which I took to be an automated  fault resolution service. Alas – it was 6 questions asking me to rate their customer service! It included “On a scale of 0 to 9 how likely would you be to recommend us?” Response “0″.

It hen asked for any other info.  Response? A link to this blog.

Stand by for an update tomorrow.