The charitable organization MySociety which builds civic websites in the UK has launched its first campaign - Free Our Bills. It’s a rather wonkish one but well worth supporting. Basically they are putting pressure on parliament to improve the way it publishes legislation online to make it easier for independent groups like them to parse the data and pull out key parts of the text (see their detailed description of the changes sought if you are interested).

Alvi, I., et al. (2007) “Meeting Their Potential: The Role of Education and Technology in Overcoming Disadvantage and Disaffection in Young People” - the 125 page report is free to download from BECTA, which sponsored it - co-authors from Media@LSE include Sonia Livingstone, Ellen Helsper and myself. Comments would be welcome.

LJ provides one of the most flexible and powerful toolsets for protecting weblog users’ privacy available today. Unfortunately, I just discovered that only paid LJ accounts have the ability to change the privacy levels of several posts at once. Surely a tool mainly useful to help users protect their privacy when they miscalculate their exposure shouldn’t be made into an added-cost ‘extra’?

I came across a great piece of research six years ago - interviews and focus groups in the UK with general public, ethnic minorities and people disadvantaged by disability or homelessness looking at their attitudes towards e-democracy proposals and what might encourage them to participate. It was commissioned by the Office of the e-Envoy and published online on edemocracy.gov.uk - a website to support consultation on edemocracy proposals. Alas, first that website and then the e-Envoy’s office were closed, and the archive of the e-Envoy’s site didn’t include this document anywhere. So in the interests of science (and with the permission of the report’s original authors, Creative Research) I have hosted the report myself. So if you’re interested in e-democracy, check out:
Creative Research (2002) “E-Democracy: Report of Research Findings” Office of the e-Envoy, London. http://davidbrake.org/ukedemocsresearch.pdf

It’s dismaying to me to see that even in a country with a healthy budget for and interest in egovernment, valuable information (paid for by the taxpayers!) can disappear from view after just six years…