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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This is a bit scary: a man who had been ordered not to contact his wife was jailed when he inadvertently sent her a message on Facebook. He claims the sign-up process confused him—in the same way that it confused me—by sending automatic friend requests to people in his existing contacts lists. “I certainly hadn’t [...]

I’ve just come across these (can’t listen to them though, as I’ve no speakers on this machine!). First is a list of ‘podcasts for general studies and citizenship‘. Second is the Grassroots Channel, inspired by the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network, which “tells the stories of ordinary people who decided to change the world around them”.

Apparently we may kill but not procreate. Not the most obvious strategy for maintaing a species. This is of course the story that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has effectively been banned in Australia because of hidden sex scenes, which can be unlocked by the player. So it’s OK to play at stealing cars, running [...]