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 up [...]

Recent research reveals that young people in the UK have little faith in journalists, but see them as having the greatest influence on government decisions. And tabloid journalists, it seems, are the worst of a bad bunch.
The research was undertaken last week by online pollsters YouGov, on behalf of the Citizenship Foundation. Almost 4,000 young [...]

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 for [...]

Citizenship Foundation CEO Tony Breslin talks to Futurelab's Cassie Hague about the role of citizenship education, technology, and the need to look for greater opportunities to encourage young people to become active citizens.
Visit Futurelab Citizenship podcast

Possibly one of the driest, most unappealing web pages you could hope to produce: but its content deserves so much more, which is why I’m adding it here.
The House of Lords and the Hansard Society are running a competition for 11-16 year olds, in which they submit views to the Lords Communications Committee. The top [...]

“Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps – we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today [...]

These are my links for 8 January 2009 through 15 January 2009:

Us Now: A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet – "Us Now is a documentary film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet.
Us Now tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the [...]