Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

Well, the pilot digital engagement discussions are over. Should we do more? I only organised three and still haven’t managed to blog about two of them yet. Still, they were good: Simon Whitehouse talked about ‘Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey‘ and Ordnance Survey OpenData, I looked at the Hansard Society’s recent report [...]

A few weeks ago Socitm released their Better Connected 2010 report on the quality of local council websites. Stuart Harrison has read the report, and in the last of our pilot digital engagement discussions he will share its insights and his thoughts on them. Socitm is the membership association for ICT professionals in Local Authorities [...]

This morning Nick Booth and I had intended to blog from Moseley for Birmingham’s Big City of Culture 24 hour blog. We failed spectacularly. However I did interview Nick eating an ostrich burger. He goes on to say how Farmers Markets are a nice cultural thing. Or something. Have a listen anyway: Listen!

On Monday I was invited to a Local Public Data Panel workshop to help address the challenge of releasing local data to the public. Local council officers, bloggers and activists were brought together to help ‘generate ideas and understanding about what is needed to drive the local public data initiative at a local level’. The [...]

For months I’ve been having conversations with people about how we should set up a Rails beginners group in Birmingham, so now I’m actually going to do it. I realise that even among beginners there will be a wide range of expertise levels. Therefore I ask attenders to have at least started trying to write [...]

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited round the new mac before its official opening next weekend. I was really very impressed. I hadn’t been particularly struck by the outside of the building, but now I’ve been inside I see the external fabric in a much more forgiving light. The interior is completely unrecognisable [...]

On the train this morning I had with me my laptop, iPhone, Flip video camera and Zoom audio recorder. But my brain wanted pen and paper: why? It wasn’t that I couldn’t use what I had, but that in order to get my thoughts out of my head relatively intact my brain needed another conduit. The thing [...]

Yesterday, as I was using the internet to prepare for a meeting, I quickly diverted to compare my election candidates and fire off an email to one asking his voting preferences. Twenty minutes later he replied. My MP is standing down, so I used TheyWorkForYou to see how her successor had voted on particular issues [...]

Last night I ran the second of my small-scale research sharing sessions, this time on the Hansard Society’s recent report ‘Digital citizens and democratic engagement‘. I hadn’t had time to plan properly (and still haven’t got around to blogging about Simon’s Ordnance Survey OpenData presentation from last week) but we still managed to have a long [...]

‘Hyperlocal’ has been a buzzword in the online engagement community for about eighteen months, and to be honest it’s not one I’ve been comfortable with: why try and define a sub-category of ‘local’ which is itself pretty undefinable? I still have a bit of a problem with it, but yesterday it did become clearer to [...]