tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-259052482009-05-26T18:49:37.791+01:00Talk is easy.Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.comBlogger113125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-65177177653355809262009-04-11T21:30:00.006+01:002009-04-14T21:25:02.895+01:00

There's been an ongoing discussion this week over at Paul Currion's blog about the benefit of croudsourcing of information in the human rights sphere, most of it criticising probably crazy ideas.Disaster first responders will need customised tools, and if they find something that will save them time, then it will get adopted. But that's always going to be harder than giving them a wiki and they

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-37569579612773128942009-03-30T00:39:00.006+01:002009-03-30T14:01:32.817+01:00

Steph at DIUS asked about lessons for FE and Govt from the "Us Now" film. My first reaction was something along the lines of "they're going to have problems".I was watching Us Now with a group of student friends a few weeks back (thanks Ivo for sending openmedia a copy), and one of the things that was mentioned in an extremely interesting debate afterwards was that Us Now didn't deal with

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-40291116203855180202009-03-29T22:25:00.004+01:002009-03-29T23:25:19.539+01:00

Dear FCO,When you claim that you have permalinks for travel advice for countries, it would be nice if you actually did:http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travelling-and-living-overseas/travel-advice-by-country/europe/france vshttp://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travelling-and-living-overseas/travel-advice-by-country/europe/france1.Cheers

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-14527533779846411682009-03-20T00:12:00.004Z2009-03-20T00:32:18.873Z

The video from the talk I gave Convention on Modern Liberty is now up. The slides that should go with it are here.

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-64432038156281916742009-03-07T20:26:00.001Z2009-03-07T20:28:20.826Z

Harry and Glyn built www.jobcentreprolplus.com at rewired state. Lots of other good stuff happened too; I'm sure it'll beonline at some point

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-48675396813586283662009-03-01T19:36:00.003Z2009-03-02T00:56:12.959Z

have started to put together what's needed for an irrepressible video project. What we really need now is more people to help with it.More details on this page: http://sebastian.foriru.co.uk/~sams/irrepressible_video/if you want to help, read the webpage to find out what we need, start coding and send me an email to let me know. Might be something to work on rewired state this weekend.This was

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-17549693755033307492009-02-28T23:50:00.004Z2009-03-01T00:04:53.904Z

Irrespressible.info (take a look if you've not seen it, otherwise this wont make sense) is a site which republishing information that someone wants to try and hide - items on democracy which are banned inside china for example.We talked about this very briefly at the convention.Doing this for video (and pdf etc - it's all regular expressions) is insanely easy. If there are people willing to help

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-31126869928647016412009-02-28T21:51:00.006Z2009-02-28T23:47:23.127Z

It was a fantastic day. Congratulations to all those who worked hard to make it so. My slides (which I read the notes from, but didn't show on screen due to cabling issues, are available here (and I'm somewhat suprised by just how many people have looked at them). There'll be video online at some point.There were various questions asked in the session that could have been answered in more detail.

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-17632048732842367592009-02-27T20:48:00.005Z2009-02-28T19:50:38.819Z

I'm speaking for a few minutes in the bloggers' summit at the convention on modern liberty tomorrow.UPDATE: The slides are up at http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/coml.pdf. More notes after I've slept.

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-62015680405364176122009-02-15T17:33:00.002Z2009-02-15T17:59:31.162Z

The call is going well so far, but there are up to 60 slots in total, and so there's plenty of space available.Open Tech 2009 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference onslightly different approaches to technology, democracy and community.Thanks to 4IP for sponsoring what promises to be a day of thoughtfultalks and conversations with friends. *What do we need?*- Proposals from people who want

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-46442219415435383412009-02-15T17:29:00.001Z2009-02-15T17:30:38.677Z

The 2009 EuroBSDcon call for papers is now out. The conference will be in Cambridge UK, and is being led by Robert Watson and myself. Find out more.

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-31887656835210512462009-02-11T17:56:00.006Z2009-02-11T18:44:03.722Z

Congratulations to Direct Gov on launching innovate.direct.gov.uk. Launched at govbarcamp with one blog post, and claims of promise. Small steps to start with, but that's ok.Then it started snowing, and various public services started to not work very well any more. Tom Watson MP registered www.schoolclosures.org.uk, and called on someone to build a mashup.Directgov stepped up and took a swing.

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-14892424861432209612009-01-11T23:55:00.006Z2009-01-12T00:18:23.735Z

Do you think there might be group of people who would be willing to put some work into editing relevant areas of a version of directGov "so that it was true"?

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-80358631435484956282009-01-07T21:38:00.002Z2009-01-07T21:46:00.256Z

The police/government/whoever have now done crime maps for the entire country.But the instructions on them are "To see a crime map for your area, go to the website of your local force and search for 'crime map'.".Why not, "Enter your postcode here and we'll show you the map for your area?"Maybe because the postcode database isn't free to those users; or maybe because they didn't think about the

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-28116265524928545222009-01-04T00:26:00.004Z2009-01-04T01:41:20.603Z

Does anyone know of any online experiences of doing anti-service-abuse stuff on a multi-lingual website without a wide ranging team of language speakers?

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-45061719506775134782008-12-17T18:20:00.001Z2008-12-17T18:21:31.046Z

Something I've been doing for ORG is now up here

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-59463305198026195432008-12-04T14:01:00.003Z2008-12-04T16:04:40.859Z

This matters.ongoing updates

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-33988584164676249872008-11-25T22:55:00.004Z2008-11-25T22:59:13.674Z

After nearly 4 years, I'm probably going to turn www.TheWhitehouseSays.com off in January. It does email alerts and RSS of all the press briefings by the WhiteHouse Press Secretary (and others).Even now, change.gov is much more interactive than the whitehouse site, and it's likely that will continue.Building something to allow comment and engagement on posts where comments are not possible will

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-59096429601023805462008-11-16T14:53:00.015Z2008-11-23T22:01:40.970Z

One of the problems various projects have is maintaining the storage of data of various types into the future. Be it online video, documents or anything else.Depending on what you're doing, you might be dealing with documents released under Freedom of Information laws, or other material (that link is well worth reading for some of the more different arguments on various issues).Video or other

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-68127597253363854282008-10-03T23:05:00.001+01:002008-10-03T23:06:07.766+01:00

The October meeting of mySociety Manchester has been postponed. The next one will be on November 19th in the Briton's Protection at 7:30pm. All welcome.

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-83342901015181482632008-09-18T16:24:00.003+01:002008-11-16T18:21:57.621Z

[this was written ages ago, but never got posted]Once again, another great blog post from Tom Steinberg.It's still true even if you don't want to start another organisation like mysociety, but if you just want to take some of the lessons from mySociety

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-39099081718279314562008-09-17T22:06:00.005+01:002008-09-17T22:19:13.948+01:00

Manchester, Withington is one of the most closely fought constituencies in the country, and the most marginal in South Manchester.In the 2005 general election, the previous Labour MP was replaced by Liberal Democrat John Leech http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/john_leech. This victory was partially attributed to a large amount of effort put in by students campaigning in the constituency, and the

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-80373043796164833762008-09-05T19:29:00.004+01:002008-09-07T17:02:33.468+01:00

I've got a twitter account for posting stuff that I can't be bothered writing a blog post about.The Labour Party Conference is also in town in a fortnight. I'll be wandering along to a couple of things that seem interesting and have caught my eye

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-45302749994787044582008-08-27T23:19:00.002+01:002008-08-27T23:21:48.834+01:00

Given that there's stuff on each of labourhome, libdemblogs and conservativehome about the Democratic convention, has anyone seen anything that looks at the similarities/differences in what those three are reporting about the same event?

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25905248.post-40275526567971549032008-08-22T15:02:00.003+01:002008-08-22T15:04:50.678+01:00

Those great people at the sunlight foundation have posted an answer to the question they get asked, of what CMS did you guys use?, as a better answer to that question than I've seen elsewhere for a while.Mainly posted so I can find it again the next time I get asked that question by people pushing their pet system which solves a different problem.

Sam Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11775878099463043852noreply@blogger.com0