Pezholio

As some of you have have seen, Sue Cameron of the Financial times has written a confused and desperate sounding article about the government’s recent announcement to open up the postcode dataset for public reuse.
As the FT doesn’t have any commenting functionality (my biggest bugbear with newspaper websites), I’ve drafted a letter to the [...]

iPhones are ace aren’t they? Despite howls of derision from some camps, in the space of a few years, it’s completely turned the mobile world on its head.
I’ve wanted to build an iPhone app for Ratemyplace – the food safety ratings website I run at the council on behalf of 8 other councils in Staffordshire [...]

I love Fixmystreet – it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a national problem reporting hub, while other council website bury their reporting facilities under pages and pages of navigation, Fixmystreet is simple, quick and direct.
What I also love is its openness, as well as being able to pull out reports for problems in your [...]

It’s been a while since I first published my Beginners’ Guide to Twitter in Local Government, and since then (although, obviously not as a direct result of my blog post!) there’s been a plethora of local authorities using Twitter.
However, with a few notable exceptions, most councils seem to prefer the ‘fire and forget’ method of [...]

Now, I’ve been banging on about local government open data for a while, I’ve been opening up various datasets on the Lichfield District Council website and generally evangelising to anyone who will listen (and even to some who won’t!)
This JFDI publish-everything-you’ve-got-in-a-database-just-because-you-can approach is all well and good if you’re a techy like me, but there’s [...]