local

OpenSpaceDevon

Carl Haggerty has launched a great initiative down in Devon:

Carl writes:

It would be great to get public sector professionals, voluntary organisations and business people involved in these areas all together and working through some of these issues and topics – Basically, i’d imagine the event to involve anyone who has an interest and passion to improve public services in general.

This is an interesting idea, and one I’m totally in agreement with. Take the format used by LocalGovCamp and other unconferences, but make it all about the geographical area. Bring together public, third and private sectors to thrash out new ways of doing things, and hopefully spark the enthusiasm needed for some of the organisational battles required to get stuff moving.

Just the sort of event I was thinking about when I wrote this post after the Lincoln LocalGovCamp.

So if you are in Devon, or just interested, pop along to the network Carl has created and join in the discussions!

Be Vocal

Be Vocal is

A site about social media for social good in Birmingham and using the internet to turn public data into something useful.

It’s part of the ‘Birmingham Open City’ project run by Digital Birmingham with a grant from the Timely Information for Citizens programme set up by the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Nick Booth is involved, so it must be good. Here he explains what it is all about:

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.

How close is local?

Paul Evans kindly asked me to write a post for the Local Democracy blog. I came up with one called How Close is Local?

I live in a house on a street, in a village, within a parish, that is in a district, a parliamentary constituency and a county too. I’m also close to a city which I visit, sometimes attend meetings but am not officially connected with in any way. I work on a regular basis in London, too.

All of these areas could legitimately be described as local – yet if I were to create project based on locality I would probably have to pick at most two or three of these to focus on. Would this still be legitimate though, and would it mean alienating people for whom local means something different?

Read the rest at Local Democracy.

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