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

Today I had a post published on the British Computer Society’s Savvy Citizens website, in which I ponder the challenges and opportunities that the internet brings for effective citizenship. I won’t re-post it here, as I’m sure the BCS would much rather you read it on their blog than mine. Suffice to say I flag [...]

According to new research, most young people aged 14-25 would be likely to vote in an election and would be more likely to if they could do so online. However, they don’t see social networking as particularly useful for furthering a cause, favouring instead an email to their Member of Parliament. A recent YouGov poll [...]

A while ago I chewed over the problem of making it easy for members of the public to leave useful contextualised information for others in spite of opposing commercial incentives. Whether their developers intended it or not, foursquare could be the solution. I had been incensed by a cashpoint in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. It [...]

What happens when paid-for news content online becomes sustainable and influential, but a significant chunk of people who are currently engaged and informed get news from other sources? (This is a very under-developed thought; I’m only putting it here because it’s too long for Twitter.) I never buy the Financial Times, but I used to [...]

In his Digital Britain Final Report, Lord Carter sets out his plan to keep Britain “at the forefront of the digital revolution”. But a revolution needs revolutionaries, who are driven by passion and not just economic incentive. Has this report overlooked the importance of people as volunteers, and the impact on their social contributions of [...]

I’ve been playing with CSS3, just for fun really. All of the styles I’ve used work in Safari; most of them work in Firefox and Opera; none of them work in Internet Explorer 7. For my test page I wanted: paragraphs with transparent coloured backgrounds layered over images; each image to be different; the boxes [...]

The IPPR is advocating a new bank holiday for November. The recommendation is that it should fall on 12 November, the day after Remembrance Sunday, and focus on honouring the contributions of individuals to society.

Am I missing something, or is the idea of physical boundaries for the Human Rights Act faintly ludicrous?

The Citizenship Foundation’s Felicity Tyson has been blogging from Madrid, where she contribute to a conference on citizenship education with teachers, NGOs and campaign groups.