Russell Davies on how we can apply on our online collborative skills to objects caled books: “for the creativity that’s running rampant online to emerge in physical forms in lots of places.”  Very much chimes with how I’m interested in creating content online and then using neighbourhood resources – like school English or citizenship lessons and photcopiers to turn these into pertinent, and easily distributed pamplets/newsletters.

Kent County Council Pic n Mix Mashup “Say, for example, somebody was going to build a third runway at the bottom of your garden and you desperately needed some information quickly. It might be quite difficult to find out all the information – particularly if you haven’t run a campaign before. But imagine if that information is already there. Imagine it being a bit like a catalogue. You might have information from the bird sanctuary about the eggs that are going to be destroyed, and something from the local school. You could manipulate all this data, maps, charts into something else, and then house that on another site. Someone else could come along and add, for example, some data on pollution.”

API’s are good: “It’s not just the API that’s a big deal, Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief data architect, told me. “It’s the discipline an API imposes,” he said. To build one, an agency has to record and store data in a way that anticipates public use. “Data sharing is no longer an afterthought,” Elin explained. “You begin with the notion that you’re going to share information. And you’re going to make it easy for people.”

Paul Henderson gets his own blog. Paul has one of the neatest social media minds I’ve messed with. His explanation of RSS is un-rivalled (no he can’t say how it works but he’s great at simply explaining what it’s for) and it was he who nailed  social reporting in just one tweet – as you can see if you read this post.