The Obama08 campaign have always made a big deal out of the fact that they raise all their funds from ordinary citizens whereas Clinton and McCain have taken millions of dollars from lobbyists and political action committees. The latest sales promotion that the Obama campaign are using is the chance Read more
MySociety, of TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow fame have started the Free Our Bills campaign to get Parliament to provide upcoming bills online in a structured data format so that anyone can publish, compare, comment or do whatever they like on them easily and quickly. So far MySociety’s attempts to persuade Parliamentary Read more
The government seems to be having problems with the human embryology and fertilisation bill. It appears they were intending to apply the whip, but Catholics, in particular, are objecting and calling for a free vote. One quote in this article really caught my attention, Denis MacShane, a former Europe minister, Read more
I’ve been following the Lord (Clive) Soley instigated group blog for a few days now and despite the awful design, name, and technical set-up it is working well at the moment. In my opinion it is because the blogging Lords are writing in a very natural language. Of the nine Read more
Colin McKay, a Canadian Government communicator and blogger and social media pioneer extraordinaire, has written The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations. It is not a technical guide. More a cultural, managerial guide to avoid the roadblocks set by IT and legal departments. Colin has blogged about it Read more
One of the highlights of the empowerment symposium in February was going for dinner and sitting between Phil Booth, from NO2ID and Carolyn Lukensmeyer from AmericaSpeaks. Amongst other things we talked about the previous symposium in Budapest and I went on as usual about how inspiring a speaker had been. Read more
Big Kudos to Ideal Government who are hosting Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO, the first blogging Permanent Secretary in the UK. Sir Bonar, perhaps stuck a little in a Civil Service mentality of talking to us, uses his first post to reflect on the "famous talk I always give to Read more
I’ve come across this lovely little research project from the Violence Research Group at Cardiff University. Basically, academics investigating youth crime involved some of the young offenders themselves, getting them interviewing the academics who study the phenomenon and film it. I’ll let them explain. As far as we are aware, Read more
David Cameron is often accused of being full of hot air and lacking real policies. All the more surprising that the majority of his speech to Conservative Councillors Association last week was devoted to the subject of data standards. He told the councillors that their councils should be publishing data Read more
The reason for me being at the symposium was to take part in the final session on Thursday. Tom Gaskin from NorfolkBlurb forced young people onto the agenda and was asked to organise a session on empowering young people. A couple of phone calls later and I was going to Read more