Lovely interview with John Naughton about the themes of his upcoming book. Worth getting everyone you know to watch this!
Month: October 2011
Shelter Housing Database
Another useful open data visualisation resource, this time from Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity.
The Shelter Housing Database“brings together government data on housing need, supply, affordability and other issues at a local, regional and national level”, allowing you to produce graphs and download data in a nice user friendly way.
Could be a very helpful resource for people working in and around housing issues.
Birmingham Civic Dashboard
The Birmingham Civic Dashboard is a neat project from the City Council that reports the requests made for services from the organisation and visualises them in interesting ways, such as by plotting them on a map.
It was funded by NESTA as part of the Make It Local programme, which also produced such excellence as the Sutton Bookswap and Kirklees’ Who Owns My Neighbourhood?
The Civic Dashboard aims to:
…make public, data relating to what issues people are reporting to the council. The belief being that when looked at on a map and in real-time the accumulation of data would provide and insight into the issues facing both the citizens of Birmingham and the council itself as it responds to the issues raised.
Interesting stuff!
Houses and clouds
The Government Digital Service blog is essential reading. Two recent posts well worth a look:
The phrase “not a CMS” has become a bit of a joke around the GovUK office (to the point where more than a few people were humming Once In A Lifetime), but it’s a key part of our approach. The Single Domain will include several components that enable publishing on the web but they’re part of a much broader ecosystem of tools wired together using APIs and designed to be constantly iterated to focus on user need. As we began to unpack what that means it became clear that we were going to need custom software.
Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, attends seminar at No. 10 Downing Street
Dr. Vogels defined cloud computing as “a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers”. Calling on his experience from across the globe he outlined how the flexibility and resilience offered by clouds has helped to transform some government instances via the idea of software as a service and the advent of reactive charging models. He gave the example of Recovery.gov in the US as just one of over 100 Government sites using cloud hosting.