memespring

I spent the other weekend encamped at the Young Foundation (albeit with forays back to the Albert) messing about with barcodes for Social Innovation Camp.
The idea of sicamp was to get groups of programmers and ideas people (not mutually exclusive) in the same place to come up with some using web tools to solve […]

… has launched.

Last weekend Jermey Gould organised a barcamp for government geeks at Google’s London HQ. There was a good mix of GovGeeks, the ‘civic hacking’ types of mySociety and FarmSubsidy.org, and people from startups like School Of Everything.
I’ve long wondered why there was such a cultural divide between the startup geek scene and the government / […]

For all the talk of social networking people forget that for a whole host of internet users have been doing this kind of thing for years using really the really the < web 1.0 technology of email groups and phpBB forums (sw4people, Urban75 and Hern Hill Forum blog are just a few local to me).
They […]

PlanningAlerts.com was up for the New Statesman New Media Award for information and openness last week. In the end we lost out to the lovely and useful Intellegent Giving, but mySociety picked up 2 for Downing Street petitions and FixMyStreet.com. Chris Lightfoot’s mum Pru accepted the second award following a nice speech from Francis.

Weirdly this […]

The raw data from PlanningAlerts.com is now available for download. Currently deciding on the best way to license it.

Decided on a Creative Commons License. I’ve also added loads more geoRSS api calls for people to play with.

Wansbeck, which I shamefully have to admit I didn’t know existed until a couple of days ago, gets a special star for being the first council to offer up their planning data in an open machine readable format.
They contacted us totally out of the blue with data in the correct format all queryable by date

We now have an API on PlanningAlerts.com that churns out a geoRSS feed for a postcode or UK grid reference.
It’s nicely coincided with google maps supporting the format, so we can make cool things like this map of applications near the City of London.
That map is a nice example of PlannignAlerts has been worth the […]

Here’s the talk I gave to the Open Knowlege Foundation’s Forum on Civic Information.