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

This discussion at yesterday’s Talk About Local un-conference was for bloggers and local websites wanting to report and discuss the imminent UK General Election. We heard that whereas it used to be the case (in broadcast journalism at least) that each political party had to be given exactly the same coverage, that is no longer [...]

So you’re keen to report on your local area. But what do you report on? In a session at the second Talk About Local un-conference, Ray Duffill sourced suggestions for finding stories. A brainstorm of the room (and subsequent discussion) came up with an abundance of ideas: Speaking to people on the streets, in the [...]

The first session I went to at yesterday’s Talk About Local un-conference was on the legal problems of managing sites that allow user feedback or investigate stories of public interest. It’s very depressing to hear of the crippling situations people repeatedly find themselves in, simply through a determination to get at the truth in the [...]

At primary school we were told a moral story that seemed to me so ridiculous that I still remember it almost thirty years later. I couldn’t believe that anyone could be quite so stupid and quite so demanding as the story’s protagonist. Last night I was talking to Paula Tew about how shifting demands placed [...]

Earlier this week Simon Whitehouse enlightened us about Ordnance Survey OpenData (which I still haven’t blogged about); on Monday I will share my limited understanding of the Hansard Society’s recent report ‘Digital citizens and democratic engagement‘. It’s not the easiest report to make sense of: I would have liked fewer paragraphs full of percentages and [...]

On Monday, the first of our three research sharing events will be looking at the Ordnance Survey’s OpenData initiative. For some time people have been crying out for OS data to be made freely available, and on 1 April Ordnance Survey announced the release of a load of it. On Monday Simon Whitehouse will be  [...]