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 [...]
Posts under ‘Media and communications’
Augmented reality and new localities
If you’re not following this one (do keep up!) the latest buzz among people with funny-shaped heads is Augmented Reality. This is where you use a technology application to tell you more about the locality you are in than your eyes can work out. There are, of course, opportunities for local authorities to ensure that more people [...]
Poblish: crowdsourcing new policies, and why blogging has to change
This is the second in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. Last week I made the case for using existing content – blog posts; Wikis, like Debatepedia; and visual debate-mapping tools, like Debategraph – as a knowledge base to drive new policy [...]
Two applications worth looking at
Two things. This is ‘why pie charts stink’ – a nice programme for visualising data: Dashboard 1 Powered by Tableau Secondly, further to Andrew’s Poblish posts, I’ve just revisited Debatepedia. I met one of the Debatepedia team last year at the WeMedia conference and I had to say at the time that it didn’t seem [...]
Poblish: when crowdsourcing new policies, don’t waste existing content
This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’ that Paul introduced yesterday. With all the talk about brand new crowdsourcing platforms, and letting the population ‘speak their minds‘, it’s easy to forget the mass of already-expressed opinion that exists [...]
Poblish: How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.
My friend Andrew Regan contacted me after reading a recent post here in which I said that I’d like to be able to link to a good essay entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’ He’s kindly offered to write it – in an extended serialised form – as part [...]
How bloggers can help people understand public service
One of the advances that the long tail of the blogosphere has brought us is that some social work gets reported properly. Not the way that newspapers often report them, in their need for sensationalism. And, of course, they do it all for nothing. Take Random Acts of Reality, for instance. The latest post is [...]
A feast of infographics
As I’ve spent a lot of time recently banging on about visual representations of policy issues, this post on the GOOD website is something of a feast.
If you watch one video this week, make it this one
Further to my previous post on why visualisation of data matters – and what the potential abuses are in the hands of pressure groups. I’ve just seen this video by an American pollster and data visualiser @alexlundry – he covers the deceptive use of visualisations and the way that lobbies use them. He covers the reasons [...]
More data for you
Another day, another step in the right direction. Boris Johnson is opening up around 200 datasets about London along with an offer of from Channel 4′s 4iP fund of up to £200,000 to help developers to create innovative applications that use it. Why is this exciting to anyone with an interest in local democracy? Well, [...]
