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

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 [...]

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 [...]

In yesterday’s interview with BBC Breakfast, Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox rather worried me. She seemed to be advocating something because someone else had told her it’s a good idea, and not because she understands the issues herself. Martha Lane Fox: “… Government is going to move most of its services onto the web [...]

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 [...]

A lot has been going on recently with regard to digital inclusion and civic engagement. People keep publishing reports that I really ought to read for work, but just don’t have the time to; and even if I did, many of them are pretty impenetrable. So I’m going to spread the load. In April I’ll [...]