Category: Miscellaneous

9th June 2009

Things I've spotted June 8th from 19:24 to 23:25

Here are some o the things I’ve been reading June 8th from 19:24 to 23:25:

Trading my 2G iPhone for cake | Pete Ashton – All bids must be a cake or combination of cakes. No biscuits. No other forms of pudding. Just cake.
Site and Sounds – mac / Cannon Hill Park | Created in Birmingham – This time, artists Kate Chapman and Charlotte Goodwin are exploring the mapping theme by inviting people who live, work or play close to mac to re-discover familiar places and explore places they have never visited before, sharing their thoughts and observations to create an audio map of the changing landscape. All of these recordings will feed into an audio map – a web of downloadable audio tracks focusing on different locations in a mile radius of Cannon Hill Park.
Open Government Brainstorm: Collaboration in Action « OSTP Blog – By generating word clouds and doing some analysis of the metadata in the dialogue, they found that people on the outside of government are focused on transparency and making data more available to the public, and on the inside, government officials want to build collaborative and participatory tools.
Snapshot of UK govnt use of social tools – and Press Office involvement « Emma Mulqueeny – It is literally a snapshot and I sincerely hope it will be taken and used by anyone who needs it.
Your Right To Know » Blog Archive » Transparency of politicians’ expenses goes global – "What’s amazing isn’t just the interest in the story but the way journalists and citizens of those countries immediately start to wonder: ‘What about our politicians? What are they doing with our money?’ And so the campaign for transparency and direct accountability goes global! Even while our House of Commons continues to work behind the scenes to block future disclosures (more on this soon), other countries are moving to greater openness.
Two political parties in New Zealand have announced proactive disclosure regimes for their politicians. Apparently, our scandal has a ring of familiarity for New Zealanders as explained in this article"

8th June 2009

Stuff I've seen June 4th through June 8th

These are my links for June 4th through June 8th:

Socially Media, Birmingham – 24Randomthoughts.com – Birmingham is a huge hive of activity there’s stuff going on every single week if you just seek it out (it took me a while to find it but then I can be quite lazy). The people that come to these events are welcoming and friendly and I have had the most excellent introduction to this scene and I know its only going to get better.
socialstrategy:start [Practical Participation] – There are many small hurdles to effective use of social media and technology in public services. In democratic engagement and participation; communications and outreach; education; or just about any other area of work – the same soluble barriers hold up action.
Headstar E-Government Blog » Blog Archive » Birmingham Transformation Aided By Mapping Tools – The group hopes to make Birmingham England’s first “intelligent city” by creating an integrated, fully digitised transport network. Birmingham also uses digital maps in its contact centres, where staff can pinpoint the caller’s property on a map and quickly bring up information relevant to that location.
Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide » The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media – It’s about having a strategy for making your company or organization more like a person and less like a machine. It’s about humanization.
LocalGov.co.uk – Your authority on UK Local Government > LocalGov.co.uk – Your authority on UK Local Government > Council freezes Twitter account after insult gaffe – Croydon council has suspended the Twitter account of its 'newspaper' Your Croydon after it 'tweeted' a dig at an Evening Standard journalist. A local newspaper has reported that a member of the council's staff used the account to criticise the reporter, claiming 'a squirrel could have run rings' around her after she had interviewed TV personality Esther Rantzen.
As Dominic Campbell put it so beatly, get over it.
The council claim that the post was supposed to be a private message, but was instead published for all to see.

It was then forced to post a further message which said: 'A few have picked up on a tweet about Esther R interview that was meant to be a PM (private message). No offence intended to ES (Evening Standard) lady! Still learning here!'

3rd June 2009

Stuff I’ve seen June 1st through June 3rd

These are my links for June 1st through June 3rd:

UKCOD, parent charity to mySociety is seeking trustees – We are looking for passionate applicants who are keen to give the often substantial time required, generally more than five hours a month. Demands on time can be unpredictable and lumpy and input from trustees can be required outside of board meetings and occasionally on short notice.

Birmingham REP deface John Baskerville’s monument | Pete Ashton – “Although our methods of advertising are environmentally friendly and meant to be non-invasive in this particular situation we made a mistake and got it wrong by placing the design where we did. We are sorry for causing offence and in addition to removing the design we have also made a donation to a Birmingham charity as a way of apologising to the local community.

Thanks to everyone for bringing this matter to our attention.

Kristian Jeffrey

Street Advertising Services”

Connected Generation unConference – Eventbrite – Connected Generation is bringing together practitioners, researchers, innovators and policy makers on 11th July 2009 to explore youth engagement in a digital age.

7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media – Interesting list of hardware and ideas which may shape the future of social media

Reboot Britain – Nesta: “Instead of more pessimism, can we really look at how we can punch through the gloom? And in particular, how can we take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services? Reboot Britain is a major new project, which will take a top-to-bottom look at the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that – uniquely – this generation has to overcome them.

1st June 2009

Stuff I’ve seen May 31st and June 1st

These are my links for May 31st and a bit of June 1st:

Reselect Democracy – “We will double the membership of the local party that we support – but only if they will let us re-select our candidate.”

Philip Morton » Archive » The state of subtitling in online media – 7.5 million people in the UK, or about 13% of the population, have some form of hearing impairment which may reduce their ability to enjoy video content.

Cui bono? The problem with opening up data at Helpful Technology – open data needs a new breed of data gardeners – not necessarily civil servants, but people who know data, what it means and how to use it, and have a role like the editors of Wikipedia or the mods of a busy forum in keeping it clean and useful for the rest of us.