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

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 [...]

So you’re keen to report on your local area. But what do you report on? In a session at the second Talk About Local un-conference, Ray Duffill sourced suggestions for finding stories. A brainstorm of the room (and subsequent discussion) came up with an abundance of ideas: Speaking to people on the streets, in 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 [...]

I’m concerned about the Digital Economy Bill so I’ve just sent one of those standard lobbying emails to my MP. I used the online form at 38 Degrees because it was easy, but I made substantial changes to the message (I would have added more but I was in a hurry, hence the convenience of [...]

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 [...]

Bruce Lawson posted this tweet: Another bloody list of sexy 404 error pages http://bit.ly/8I4D3d that doesn’t include my custom 404 page from 2004 http://bit.ly/8D5oJe I say ‘favourite’ to make Bruce feel better, but it’s probably true anyway. Visit My favourite 404 error page

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 [...]

Last night I went to Education Unbound 2008, a debate on ‘how social technologies are blurring formal and informal learning‘. The panel comprised Dan Sutch (Futurelab), David Noble (Hillside School, Fife), Andy Gibson (School of Everything) and Catherine Howell (Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies). It was chaired by Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor at Channel [...]

In a recent forum* post someone asked how to deliver online content to offline users. An understandable question maybe, but (I believe) a mistaken objective: communicating effectively should be more important than ensuring everyone has the same experience.