Citizen Engagement in Australia

Despina Babbage from the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development in the government of the state of Victoria in Australia emailed me this morning to let me know about her blog, which is all about citizen engagement.

It’s well worth subscribing to, as Despina does a great job of pulling together activity from all over the world – and it’s nice to hear from others what they think about what we are doing here in the UK, too!

Bookmarks for April 4th through April 13th

Stuff I have bookmarked for April 4th through April 13th:

Mash the State

Mash the State is a campaign to “encourage UK government and public sector organisations to make their data available to the general public.”

The first part of the campaign is dedicated to getting local authorities in the UK using RSS to disseminate information from their websites. Currently only 66 of 434 local councils currently produce RSS.

Helpfully, a PDF one pager has been published to explain why this is a good idea. There is also a blog so you can keep up with developments.

Mash the State is the brainchild of Adrian Short, who has also founded a civic hacking club in Sutton, London; and developed a rather neat local news aggregator.