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

The good folk at civicuk have built a free tool that takes all the sweat out of complying with the cookie regulations. Cookie Control creates an opt-in for your visitors that is clear, uncluttered and unobtrusive. You can tell it whether to pop up when the page is loaded, how long to pop up for, where to [...]

The UK government wants public sector reform, and a big part of its plan involves transparency. However, some datasets on data.gov.uk are too shoddy to be useful. I suspect if people were managed and treated better they might take more interest in the quality of their work. (I’ve been blogging about open data on my Open Local [...]

Today I got an invitation to join DotGovLabs (currently in private beta), which aims to ‘nurture digital innovation from outside government from the people who know digital’. It’s hard to figure out what it’s for, and if you’re not a member the website (linked to from their Twitter account) gives nothing away. However, if you [...]

Last night I set up the Electronic Civic Council. It’s aim is to encourage people to use geo-location tools to share historical or civic information about places. It came from a chat with Jon Bounds, who in turn had been chatting with Jez Collins about spreading music-related trivia. It’s a bit of fun really, but [...]

This page has been around for a good while. I’m flagging it up now because I’m trying to build up a sort of toolkit and primer for colleagues managing websites; the rather unsophisticated ‘every user should have exactly the same experience on our website’ is – sadly and surprisingly – still a common attitude. This [...]

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 [...]

Education Eye is a pretty tool from Futurelab, showcasing online educational innovations. “Education Eye is a free, engaging and easy-to-use online space that gives access to a wide range of useful and relevant innovations across educations’ varied communities. Connecting people with innovative uses of digital technology, new resources and new approaches to teaching and learning [...]

I’m trying to teach myself Rails, but I’m not even a programmer. So when I’m stumped, I’m fairly stumped. Currently my app is not saving form data when it should be, and redirecting when it shouldn’t. Update I’ve actually fixed this now. It was the ‘home_path’ route that was causing the problems. Thanks to everyone [...]

I’m trying to draw up a list of key legal considerations for people commissioning websites. I welcome your input. There is a lot of this information littered around the Internet, but I want a simple list of key points with links to further information that I can share with people; so I thought I’d try [...]

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 [...]