Obama’s democracy

Interesting paper from Delib on the approach to government taken by the Obama administration in the States:

The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked. Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead a steady stream of pilot e-democracy projects and iterative improvements using an array of different web 2.0 tools.

Obama’s democracy 2.0

Sarah Brown blog – No 10 team just does it

Sarah Brown G8 blog

Great work from the webbies at Number 10. Wanting a way to let Sarah Brown discuss some of the activities going on around the G8 summit, they produced a great quick-and-dirty solution by hosting a blog using the free WordPress.com platform.

It’s perfect for a time limited site like this, and what’s more they have managed to get it looking great too.

An awesome example of JFDI in action!

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.