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

At UK GovCamp recently a bunch of us looked at what an open data platform should look like. Not the technical stuff, but what a council would need to do to make the most of it. One aspect of that is how to encourage interest and trust from people who have ideas for using the [...]

Today I got an invitation to join DotGovLabs (currently in private beta), which aims to ‘nurture digital innovation from outside government from the people who know digital’. It’s hard to figure out what it’s for, and if you’re not a member the website (linked to from their Twitter account) gives nothing away. However, if you [...]

Lots of people in the voluntary sector will tell you that your organisation should be using Twitter*, and that it’s easy to engage with your audience by doing so. What many seem to overlook is that while Twitter may well be a useful tool for your work, there is no ‘one size fits all’ model [...]

The only difference between engaging someone in public consultation and engaging them in user testing is, as far as I can see, the type of reward they get for taking part. With user testing it’s easy: the client pays a company an extortionate amount of money to test their product; or, if it’s being done [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]