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

I’m a big fan of the BBC, and very pleased that Mitch Benn is releasing this song on 1 November. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get it to Christmas Number One while the government is busy tearing chunks out of the Corporation?

Yesterday I told you I was to be liveblogging with a couple of cabinet ministers. Well, I did it. The result below is not a comprehensive account of the session, but I got as much down as I could. 5:37 Andrew Mitchell telling us how great Birmingham is, and how the Tories enjoy coming here, and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This discussion at yesterday’s Talk About Local un-conference was for bloggers and local websites wanting to report and discuss the imminent UK General Election. We heard that whereas it used to be the case (in broadcast journalism at least) that each political party had to be given exactly the same coverage, that is no longer [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]