Creative Citizens is a project that’s been running for a couple of years bringing together research and activity around hyperlocal websites and active citizens. There’s some fine people involved, including Dave Harte (an old friend and collaborator of ours) and one of the researchers has also been investigating motivations behind the brilliant WV11 blog run …
A challenge to the idea of economies of scale in public services…
Locality has published some research which counters the argument that large organisations will deliver public services the most efficiently and cost effectively. It’s timely when budget holders are looking at cutting the small, perhaps seduced by the arguments of the large. A new paper, ‘Public Services, Civil Society & Diseconomies of Scale’, outlines this research …
Recent things written about open data and community groups and democracy
BBC Reports that ” The UK government is the most open and transparent in the world, according to global rankings looking at public access to official data. But web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose organisation compiled the table, says the country has “a long way to go” before it has a fully open government http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30883472 …
Social Media Surgeries and Open data – a new thing.
Since 2008 our approach to social media surgeries has remained pretty much the same. If we’ve done anything it’s seek to protect their simplicity and simplify them even further. That is now changing – a little bit. We are working with Digital Birmingham and the Cabinet Office transparency team to introduce (in some cases release) …