Following Chris’s post about English Heritage’s ‘Your Place or Mine’ the other week, we were pointed in the direction of a subsequent English Heritage social media project, the aptly-named ‘Our Place’.
‘Our Place’ describes itself as ‘…for people who work in broadening access to heritage. It is an online space where you can network with peers, share and be inspired by project case studies, and… read more
‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ is an extension of Squidoo, a site that lets users collect content on a particular topic from all around the web in one place. We’re not particularly enamoured with Squidoo itself (to put it politely) but, having first seen it yesterday, I think ‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ looks far simpler, cleaner and with a stronger proposition. The idea is that you set up two opposing ideas… read more
I was pleased to read Kablenet’s piece on OGC ‘open[ing] the door for feedback’.
The government’s procurement standards body, the OGC, has launched a supplier feedback service ‘invit[ing] suppliers of public sector goods and services to comment on contentious issues and poor practice in public sector procurement, with the aim of helping the government become a better customer’.
Excellent. Putting aside for a moment the fact that… read more
There’s a lot to spark interest and further discussion in this Kable summary of the New Local Government Network’s paper 21st Century Democracy: e-petitioning and local government.
Leaving aside the debate about e-petitioning as a method in itself, I thought there were two general points made in the paper that were worthy of further consideration…
Firstly, that ‘the paper identifies four key advantages for councils to introduce e-petitioning:
I was more than a little surprised when I saw this on one of the billboards opposite our Bristol office this morning:
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‘Extra bank holiday’? ‘Vote for a free day’? That’s our campaign! You may remember our whole ‘Bristol Day’ campaign from last year but if… read more
The BBC has an article on Jimmy Wales’s new open-source search venture, Wikia Search.
It’s not really our place to comment on the likely success of this as a web initiative and it’s not the technology that particularly caught my attention (Google and others are all working on similar participation-search efforts anyway). What stood out to me was, again, the ability and willingness of web initiatives to embrace… read more
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!… read more
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