The Defunct Jobcentre Plus Mirror on Twitter

An investigation of Twitter, the micro-Blogging site was undertaken and a series of pilots put together for individual and groups of Jobcentre Plus offices. These pilots offered automatic updates of jobs more-or-less as they are seen by the now closed Jobcentre Plus Mirror. The pilots were largely for Cumbria, and because they are automated, a special account was set-up for feedback and other human interaction. The work was subject to a Technical Note, TN-2012-01-01: "Timely Notification using Micro-Blogging". While useful, it did not attract a large number of users and was thus largely consider unsuccessful.

The Jobcentre Plus Mirror has now been completely replaced by a pure-demonstration Jobcentre Plus Examplar and these Twitter experiments abandoned. One account (@JCPM_Feedback) has been left for continued debate.

Automated Twitter Feeds

The Twitter experiments were organised into a number of loosely-themed Pilots and were broadly divided into three groups, the Cumbrian, the Heavy and the Specialist. These pilots aim to automatically post job vacancies, 'tweeting' is the term employed, within certain criteria in accounts specially dedicated to that task, and associated with certain UK Jobcentre Offices in a timely and prompt manner. It was all very unofficial.

Tweeting and twittering

With the withdrawal of the Jobcentre Plus Mirror, we're not allowed to scrape the relevant Government site anymore, and thus there's no feed of vacancies to provide these Tweets. We've therefore closed all but one of these accounts, they were:

• @JCPM_Carlisle (Cumbria Pilots)
• @JCPM_ECumbria
• @JCPM_Furness
• @JCPM_SCumbria
• @JCPM_WCumbria (kept as an example)
• @JCPM_Aberdeen (Heavy Traffic Pilots)
• @JCPM_Barnsbury
• @JCPM_Leeds
• @JCPM_Nottingham

Finally there was one specialised 'National' account associated with a single vacancy type, using one particular Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) Code, @JCPM_National.

All there accounts have now been either suspended or closed. In one instance one has been re-named and re-purposed. We've left one of these accounts, @JCPM_WCumbria, live but inactive, so that you can see what it all looked like in its pomp.

Some of these accounts were suspended by Twitter, unilaterally and without explanation. We never did find out why.

While these Twitter accounts where automated, but one was specifically setup for feedback and other human interaction (@JCPM_Feedback). Since the closure of the Jobcentre Plus Mirror this has become part of a wider forum debating Open Data and Government Computing. This account is monitored by the author personally, but it is suggested, though, that the occasional old-fashioned e-mail wouldn't go amiss.

Third-Party Twitter Support

There are now a number of Twittering Jobcentre Plus offices. These appear to be a grass-roots effort, with little apparent guidance from any central authority. There's therefore an endearing amateur quality to some of them, but, nevertheless, they do recognise and try to fulfil Social Network need. Twitter isn't just about organising riots. It is this same need that we'd tried to address with the Twitter Pilots, and no end of experts seem to have recognised and written about it. In the absence of anything more formal, the Twittering Jobcentres are therefore the "Code and Consensus" that are required to make these things work. Approving of this, help and support was given where it could. The help was largely in the form of a now redundant Redirection Service and a now increasing out-of-date catalogue of Twittering Offices.

Disclaimer

As with the rest of the JCP Mirror works, the responsibility for the content of the automated Twitter messages, abbreviated though they are, rests with Jobcentre Plus.

Updates

Feedback is actively solicited and the author would be happy to receive e-mail on this. Should something require changing or enhancing then the fact will be acknowledged with attribution, if requested, here.

The Mirror is Now The Exampler

The now-defunct Jobcentre Mirror has been extensively reworked to allow the technology to be demonstrated on old out-of-date data. Sadly the lack of a data-stream means that the remaining Twitter Pilots will be closed and this document has been changed to reflect this. 2013-01-05

~Z~

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Jobcentre Plus Examplar Search

We've two search interfaces to the sample database. One based on the local Jobcentre Plus office and the other on an ad-hoc search.

Find your local office: 

Example: "chester".

Or, alternatively, try typing this kind of query: something in somewhere. Everything's optional. Experiment!

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About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.