Author: Nick Booth

Stuff I've seen June 15th through June 16th

These are my links for June 15th through June 16th:

  • Digital Britain – final report – The Digital Britain Final Report is one of the central policy commitments in the Government's Building Britain's Future plan and draft legislative programme.

    Building Britain's Future sets out the practical action we will take to build a stronger, fairer and more prosperous country. It focuses the energy and mission of the government in the year ahead on three clear priorities:

    * Cleaning up politics and reforming our democracy
    * Moving from recession to recovery and planning for a strong economy in the future; and
    * Reforming Britain's public services.

  • Social Innovation Camp | The Young Foundation – Great ideas: Social Chain Gangs Flash-mobbing with a purpose. This tools aims to get a bunch of people together to get something done, whether it's cleaning up a local park, helping your neighbours move in, a quick spot of gardening – fast.

    Now all we need is the people who'd like to help.

  • ASH-10 » Digital Britain needs real Digital Literacy – Pete Ashton: "I’m able to read online news for free because I can hack a URL. Can you?"
  • #iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners – The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through twitter.
  • The Stone Tapes: Feed me! – How my iPod feedreader rendered the latest blog entries from http://podnosh.com/blog/

Things I've spotted June 14th from 17:10 to 21:15

Here are some o the things I’ve been reading June 14th from 17:10 to 21:15:

  • One Page Guide to Google Groups E-mail Lists : Tim’s Blog – Even with all the amazing social web tools available out there – e-mail remains a key communication tool for most people.
  • CHANGEit IdeasFund for Young Creatives | VCS Matters – CHANGEit, which is an organisation that recognises, supports and rewards young people who want to, or have already spoken up and taken constructive action about something they want to be improved, changed or created in their community has announced that it is seeking applications to its new £50,000 IdeasFund.
    The aim of the Ideas Fund is to support creative enterprise and seeks to promote new and exciting ways of working between young people and organisations that are driven by and for young people
  • Imagine: School Design for the Future. – Imagine’ is a database which captures school design best practice from around the world. Architects and researchers from the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield [BDR] have conducted a critical analysis of over 150 schools, highlighting excellence in design according to different themes. It considers integrated ICT, environmental design and flexibility for space and learning.
  • The growth of social lending – Third Sector Foresight – Anyone heard of Twollars? Well they're a new online 'currency of appreciation' that you can use on Twitter to reward positive actions. Each Twitter user automatically has 50 Twollars in their account. So they're great news for VCOs as people can give Twollars to the charity of your choice and once the charity has created an account, they can sell their Twollars to businesses and people who support their cause and want more Twollars. So, Twollars are designed to go back into circulation.
  • ASH-10 » A Local Blogs Blog for Birmingham – Over the weekend it became apparent to me that I couldn’t keep all the local blogs that have sprung up in Birmingham straight in my head. I was also aware that what defines a “local blog” is somewhat, well, ill defined. so I started Local Blogging Birmingham, a quick and dirty Tumblr blog to record them as I find them and add a bit of commentary.
  • ASH-10 » Towards a Theory of Yurtification – I superimposed a photo of a yurt on a volcano but fits current thinking about the digital divide and needs to be considered when thinking about these things.

    So that’s my Yurtification theory. In short, the pyramid will be softened, Mongolian style.

  • Videopress | DavePress – Well, VideoPress looks like it might be worth looking into. It’s been created by Automattic, the guys behind WordPress and various other cool things. It’s a video upload and hosting service that uses WordPress.com as its back end, as far as I can tell. But you can embed your videos wherever you like.

Please vote for your favourite piece of Brum Digital Civic Activism

As the awards site itself says:

Who do you think should win the first ever Midlands Media Awards People’s Choice Award?

This award will recognise an individual or group that has used social media tools to make a difference.

The four candidates are the Brum Bloggers Social Media Surgeries,  the Big City Talk site, the 4am Project (in the lead as I write) and the Black Country Facebook Group.  Other things could have been nominated, but I think these were the only four submitted (I nominated the surgeries).

Whatever you do,  please vote.  The Birmingham Press Club and Raffaela Goodby at Birmingham City Council have taken the time to notice interesting digital/civic things are happening in Birmingham.  It’s worth a moment to acknowledge that and get involved.

Use  this link to support the one you prefer.

Why it's great that Tim Berners-Lee is advising the British Government.

The announcement that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be advising the UK Government is important not because he invented the world wide web, it’s not even because he’s very clever, and so credible he’s hard to ignore.

It’s simple because he’s really is obsessed with data. I know that seems like statement of the bleedin’ obvious but its worth saying.  This is good news because he really does know what he’s talking about. If you want to appreciate how much he cares, watch this TED.com talk from February 2009:


In it he talks about his concept of Linked Data, which asks for 3 things:

  1. Individual bits of data should also be given web addresses, that’s an address beginning with http for every bit of data within another document: people, places, events, products, genes, chemicals etc etc.
  2. That data appears in some sort of useful protocol.
  3. When we get the information it also contains relationships –  and whenever it expresses a relationship, the thing it relates too also has an address starting with http.

So Tim Berners-Lee cares about much more than the mechanics of how we move to HTML 5 (the new rules for how we will work the www).  He cares about how data can make government more transparent and help knowledge evolve faster.  His role will include (hat tip to Tom Scott):

  1. overseeing the creation of a single online point of access and work with departments to make this part of their routine operations.
  2. helping to select and implement common standards for the release of public data
  3. developing Crown Copyright and ‘Crown Commons’ licenses and extending these to the wider public sector
  4. driving the use of the internet to improve consultation processes.
  5. working with the Government to engage with the leading experts internationally working on public data and standards

He also believes in the power of grassroots movements. That’s Us.  As he puts it in the talk:

I asked people to put their documents on this web thing, and you did!  Thanks.  It’s been a blast.

He understands that the remarkable thing about the internet is we built it.  It flourishes because we choose to share stuff with each other using the rules he created back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

So a world wide web of Linked Data is not something he expects big commerce or big government to take sole responsibility for. He expects us to learn how to do it, just as every time we add something to Facebook we show that we have learnt how to play our part in making the World Wide Web.

You might also want to listen to this interview with Rory Cellan-Jones, about the problems of bureacracy. Emma Mulqueeny thinks his reputation will bring much needed “serious intervention” to a data muddle, while Paul Canning echoes that, hoping that (with the departure of Tom Watson from the Cabinet Office) Sir Tim might be able to act as a data head-banger.