Pezholio

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 [...]

It’s been a few weeks now since I posted my first foray into the Edubase dataset, and since then, there’s been a few changes to the dataset, so I thought I’d give it another crack – the end result meaning I might have something exciting for everyone to benefit from!
Since the dataset was published, the [...]

With all this talk of data, and online, we can often lose sight of the real, physical world (as a certified iPhone addict, I know I do – there’s been a few times I’ve almost walked into a lampost due to me paying more attention to my phone than what’s going on in front of [...]

Certainly not me! We as councils are constantly being asked to save money, and one big element of this is front facing customer services. It’s estimated that it costs councils £6.56 to deal with enquiries face to face, £3.22 by telephone contact, and 27p for online *.
So, imagine my joy when I get this tweet [...]

As a lot of you probably know, I’m a big fan of open data, as well as driving innovation and making it easier to share information, it’s also a lot of fun.
Now, councils are pretty slow in picking this stuff up, for all sorts of reasons (lack of knowledge / interest, lack of technical skills, [...]

In case you’ve had your head buried in a good few feet of sand, then you’ll know all about the issues surrounding the new Birmingham City Council website. I won’t get into it too much here, but, suffice to say, the project was over budget, late and didn’t deliver half of what is expected from [...]

A thought occurred to me when driving to work this morning (’cos I’m sad like that) about the kinds of services councils need to manage their social media (in particular Twitter) presence well.
This is particularly pertinent with the demise of Twitapps, which, amongst other things, allows you to keep tracks of @ replies via email. [...]