The Bird’s Eye View: Issue #6

Well, like a true Irishman I’m going to talk about the weather again. What a great few days we’ve had, and I could say that maybe we’re all beginning to think we might get the whole summer out of it. Anyway, this is my last Bird’s Eye View for a few weeks as I fly off to more predictable sunshine. I hope the good weather continues in my absence, but now, let’s go straight on to the weekly dispatch…

As well as working in Dovetail, Martin performs voluntary work for the Civil Society Organisation ActiveCitizen. For over a year now, Martin has been meeting with media, politicians and civil servants trying to persuade them that Ireland should join the Open Government Partnership (OGP). OGP is an international initiative to promote government reform, transparency, accountability, citizen participation in policy-making, and the provision of Open Data. 

On May 20 Minister Brendan Howlin finally announced that Ireland had sent its Letter of Intent to OGP chairman, Rt Hon Francis Maude MP.  (You can see ActiveCitizen’s response here.) Subsequent to this announcement, Transparency International Ireland was appointed to administer the public consultation during the first phase of the project.

This week, Transparency scheduled the inaugural public meeting of OGP Ireland. OGP is an opportunity for citizens at large to present policy suggestions which influence how Ireland operates. The first OGP Action Plan should be ambitious, so come along and bring your ideas, opinions and expertise to the meeting on Wednesday, July 10, in Wood Quay Venue.  You can register for the event here and it will be streamed live here.

During the week, Tomas started on the public appllication (iCIS) and internal operational system (Eolas) changes for CIS. More work was done adding content to the CIS marketing site as part of the UX process we have discussed in previous editions.

Mossy is putting finishing touches on the new Dovetail Marketing site, codename: Flycatcher. The new site is a small refresh on the existing design, but the intention is to deliver our message more clearly and allow visitors to get a better and quicker understanding of our skill set. Case studies are a big part of this offering, which will allow potential customers to see exactly what we have done for others. As part of this process I have been working on the case study for the IKEA Family Kiosk project. In an effort to write better case studies, I found some excellent examples, the best example is here.

FSAI have completed the first phase of testing the restaurant calorie counter and feedback is being collected. We will do a small piece of development work based on this feedback, which should improve the system for the next phase of testing.

Finally, here’s something a little interesting. Tomas and I came across an SMTP Server issue on PerfectCard Vouchers this week. After some investigation we discovered that the standard .Net SMTP library was failing to send emails to Hotmail addresses. When our server was attempting to send the mail to Hotmail, it was identifying itself as ‘localhost’, which is the default identifier. Hotmail complained that this was not a fully qualified name and did not accept the mail from our server. The workaround was to make our SMTP server identify itself as servername.dovetail.ie instead of localhost by extending the standard SMTP class. We found the solution here.