Dave

Dave

  • Joined: January 6, 2026
  • Articles: 3256
  • Comments: 519

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…

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…

Houses and clouds

The Government Digital Service blog is essential reading. Two recent posts well worth a look: What is that beautiful house? The phrase “not a CMS” has become a bit of a joke around the GovUK office (to the point where…

Being good at work

Lovely post from Stephen Hale: I think the culture and tools of social networking can go a long way to improve how people manage and share knowledge inside an organisation, and increase individuals’ productivity at work. Lots of people could…

If this then that

Here’s another cool little tool. ifttt, or ‘if this, then that’ is a way of automating tasks across your social networks. It describes itself as ‘digital duct tape’. It basically allows you to set rules and actions to happen whenever…

Trello, neat organising tool

Apologies for the light blogging this week, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling about. Still, I came across Trello yesterday, a cool and lightweight planning tool. It allows you to create lists of actions, which can be filled in…

ACAS’ social networking guidance

ACAS – the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, who you’ve probably heard of on news reports about negotiations between employers and unions – have published some guidance for employers on how to manage staff use of these sites at work.…

Starting up DaveMail

I had a go at doing an email newsletter once before – put a signup form here on the blog, got quite a few people to subscribe, and then never got round to sending a single issue. Useless! Part of…

Clouds v cartels

Interesting article by the erstwhile US government CIO Vivek Kundra, in the New York Times: AS the global economy struggles through a slow and painful recovery, governments around the world are wasting billions of dollars on unnecessary information technology. This…

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. We the People | The White House – E-petitions, White House style How to create sustainable open data projects with purpose – Nice article from MySociety's Tom Steinberg. One in…

The Learning Pool Community Day – 14 September

I’ll be joining my good friends at Learning Pool on the 14th September in celebrating their Community Day – where the UK’s biggest public sector online learning community will be coming to life. The packed agenda features plenty of reasons…

“Kids today need a licence to tinker”

Nice article by John Naughton on the state of IT education in schools: What is happening is that the national curriculum’s worthy aspirations to educate pupils about ICT are transmuted at the chalkface into teaching kids to use Microsoft software.…