Pezholio

QR codes are all the rage at the mo, after a bit of a slow start, they’re popping up everywhere, even appearing in cookery programmes. I’ve decided to take advantage of this, and have started a project to get QR codes on planning notices, so if someone is out and about and they see a [...]

Foursquare. It’s just a vanity publishing tool that takes over your Twitter stream and Facebook feed right? OK, I’m as guilty as the next Foursquare user for checking in to the pub at lunchtime and telling all my Twitter followers, but Foursquare can actually be a pretty useful tool for giving visitors and residents useful [...]

It’s been a while since my last post about local spending data, and, since then, our finance team have been busy beavering away behind the scenes to get our own spending data out of the council’s finance systems. However, from the outset, I was really pleased that both our finance people and our chief exec [...]

During the Lichfield Hacks and Hackers day yesterday (bigger blog post to come on that later) – I was gifted a list of grit bins in Lichfield District, I got very excited about this, but my excitement was quickly dampened when I realised that there was no geographical data in the list, just road names [...]

On Friday, I toddled along to London for a bit of a chat about local spending data, organised by LeGSB, the local government e-Standards body. In particular we looked at how councils can publish their spending data in a linked data format. It was an interesting day, and much of the work seems to have [...]

Today I was at a ‘quick and dirty’ local spending data workshop at Birmingham City Council’s newly refurbished offices on Lancaster Circus. There’ll be more detailed info to come on the Local Open Data Community (login required), but I just wanted to blog a few of my thoughts post the meeting. There was a lot [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]