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

One of the challenges facing proponents of open data is persuading others of its value; particularly persuading the custodians of data that making it publicly available is a valuable thing to do, and is in their interest to do it. Dan Slee (Walsall Council) and Stuart Harrison (Lichfield District Council) and myself have compiled some [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We’re seeing a lot of it lately, in the run-up to a General Election: one party does something bad, the other party jumps on it; then it happens again, but the other way round. But does this bickering do them any good? I for one am put off voting at all, let alone for the [...]

In response to Gordon Brown’s speech on ‘Building Britain’s Digital Future’, Ben Whitnall of Delib asked if interested parties would like to group together to take a lead: ‘let’s get some interested people together and help design the future of digital deliberative democracy for the government. It’ll be faster, better and, with any luck, more [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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