Has David Cameron been talking to Tom Steinberg at MySociety?  His announcement yesterday suggests he has because he wants to make ‘scraping’ easier.  Scraping is the process of harvesting information from government websites and reusing it – hopefully for public good.

The Conservative leader quoted a really good example with the mysociety website theyworkforyou which provides [...]

You may have heard me before railing at the term user generated content. It infuriates me because it embodies two ideas: “you mean we can get them to make films for us for free?” and “Well yes they can use our space but only when and how it suits us”.
It begins with the assumption [...]

Perhaps inspired by the buy-one-give-one-away early campaign from the One Laptop per Child programmes an environmental housing developer in Sacremento is offering BOGOF on Houses.

If you buy one of their US homes they will train a mason in Burkina Faso to build a home there.

They call the project Real Estate Development 2.0. I like [...]

A while back Antonio Gould sat in my back bedroom and we talked about social media. He’d come round to record some ideas about podcasting for his fifth and apparently final Birmingham made Channel 4 media cast. It is a great listen. Antonio has a clear and enthusiastic delivery, well produced, with loads of [...]

There’s an established link between grime and crime, which is why Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum is using public money to crack crime one fridge at a time. This podcast and the youtube video you can see here or here explain how the forum has been using £10,000 from an experiment called the [...]

 

 Kingstanding Bimringham and the NPRG experiment on crime and grime [10:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Benjamin Zander, Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, plays the audience at Davos.  The job of leaders, he tells us, is to “awaken possibility in other people”.

Hat tip.

A wonderful idea picked from work David Barrie was doing in Middlesborough. Designing a town/city/community/region around food supply. Perhaps this is a way forward for the  £50 million Lottery bid for the Black Country Urban Park.

Watch this – no seriously watch this video.  Thanks and thanks.