I’ve just had this article published by The Telegraph. Sometimes, it’s only when you read yourself elsewhere that you see that you buried your more important point under less significant ones. “Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are [...]
Posts under ‘Media and communications’
Three signposts off
I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else. Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy [...]
Gentle mockery
It’s Friday. And it’s nearly hometime. Let’s just pop over to the Glum Councillors tumblr site to see if there’s anything to look at? Well, there’s Cllr Doherty (pictured): “If this corner doesn’t qualify as a dangerous bend, I don’t know what does,” said Cllr Doherty standing at the corner … in the road … with [...]
Using a weblog crowdsource intelligence
I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP. As with all political weblogs that host [...]
How to increase the ‘chatter’ level on a policy area you care about
If you will permit me a small plug for some work I’m doing, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Centre for School Design – a project that was launched on Monday evening by the British Council for School Environments (BCSE). I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now [...]
Poblish: a new vision for blogging, and content-based policy crowdsourcing
This is the third in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. In part 2, last week, I described how existing content – the blogosphere, in particular – is currently used, or perhaps abused, by policymakers. This time, I’m going to cover a [...]
The story of Data.gov.uk
Here’s James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine: “Some of Britain’s most impressive internet policy experts had long been trying to break down this particular door. Ex-MP Richard Allan. Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson. Internet gurus Tom Steinberg, and Tom Loosemore. Former Number 10 policy advisor William Perrin. All bounced back dazed when they tried shoulder charging [...]
UK Data website launched
No time to post much here today apart from to point to the new UK government data website – www.data.gov.uk – as described here. There are plenty of data sets that allow you to browse geographical data and find out different information about local schools and other services. There’s also a good section in which [...]
OpenlyLocal
If you get a moment, pop over to OpenlyLocal and have a look around, will you? It’s a very good start – showing how all of the investment in data standards is beginning to find it’s own tipping point. It is beginning to be possible for more of us to get really useful comparative data [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
