I loved working on this project. There's something about having a impending ministerial deadline that gets everyone focused. It's one of the few times I get to concentrate on one project and can do it really well.

John Hutton, Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions was holding a series of debates and discussions around the country. This was to be backed up by an on-line consultation survey asking the wider public's opinion.

The questions had been prepared for us and it was down to my team to present them in the best way possible. I designed the survey interface and pair programmed it with David Joseph.

The survey was created using PHP. There were nine pages of questions. Each page validated itself, the answers were collected at the end, and then posted to another server.

The questions, their order and the type of answers were constantly changing right up to the deadline. We created validation routines that were generic enough to cope with this really well. It also means they can be easily reused on future surveys.

This Guardian article talks about the on-line debate before it was live. On the day this BBC article talked about the national events and linked to the debate site. We knew the BBC were going to write about us, and I was a bit disappointed they didn't make a bigger deal of my survey.

The survey was only live for a short time. I'm hoping we'll get to do more on-line consultation stuff. I think there are a lot of exciting possibilities.