Just before we all run off on our holiday-season holidays, we want to wish you a very merry Christmas and happy New Year! We hope you have a great time and we'll speak to you in 2008... Bye for now!… read more

The BBC have a piece on the democratic application of Facebook's social capacity.  I suspect that Facebook is more likely to affect legislation rather than 'effect' it (as the article's strapline, perhaps mistakenly, claims) but it's always good to see mainstream recognition of these broad e-democratic principles.  It's also another case of a popular internet tool (which are often democratic in nature) being… read more

Maidstone have just closed their budget consultation for this year, including their Budget Simulator which, in the month it was live, collected over 770 responses. They incentivised use of the Simulator by entering participants into a prize draw for a £250 shopping voucher and did a good job of promoting the Simulator through various council and associated websites. Congratulations, Maidstone, on another successful implementation!…

This article from 'Democracy Journal' is a very interesting quick read.  It says it's about 'how open-source technology can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic' but it's really applicable to internet technology generally, not just open source (in case that was going to put you off).  It's a pretty condensed precis of lots of thinking already so I won't attempt to summarise it further here

Back in the good old days of the internet, just as it was taking off, some people made a bit of cash from buying other companies' domain names and then selling them back to them at a profit. Eventually a few court cases pretty much put paid to this idea, as people asserted their right to domain names over those that had initially bought them. But now, with blogging… read more

You may have seen recently the furore over 'Beacon', a new application introduced by Facebook. Beacon is a tool which tracks, when you're signed into Facebook, what you do online and posts it to your Facebook profile. The idea behind it being that people trust what their peers are doing more than advertising messages from big business, and are thus more likely to buy say, a book, if they see… read more

I set up a new blog on wordpress about a week ago, not work related, but a handy opportunity to have more of a play with wordpress. I've spent the first week working on it, populating it with content ready for launch, all the usual stuff. As I did so though, something reasonably unexpected happened, I started getting a fair bit of traffic to the site, and even people commenting… read more

Drum roll . . . trrrrrrrrrrr . . . we're proud to announce the re-launch of CitizenSpace.com! Citizenspace was originally launched as a consultation portal in 2005, however in the last few months we've been having a re-think about what best to do with it and we decided on . . . well . . . a space for citizens (hence the name). The overall (and fairly loose) idea is… read more

YourPlaceormine.org.uk is way out of date (over a year old now), however it's definitely worth a mention.  Run as the virtual debate platform for English Heritage's national conference, the site is a great example of making the most out of mixing blogging platforms with multi-media features such as podcasting. The… read more

This is good: The Public Office. They 'believe that public servants, industry leaders and other stakeholders should work together formally across their organisational boundaries to design effective and cost-efficient provision that is driven fully by the needs of the end-users'. Yes to that. Also, interesting to note the number of web services they make mention of in their .pdf book, both as examples of user-centric design… read more