CountCulture: PlanningAlerts is dead, long-live PlanningAlerts
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Great news of the revival of one of the best local data projects: "[we] are now hard at work building PlanningAlerts into OpenlyLocal"
Category Archives: localdata
Telegraph: Councils spend £100m on taxpayer-funded credit cards
"This newspaper has obtained details of credit card spending at 186 councils across Britain using Freedom of Information laws. Over the past three years, documents show these councils have spent more than £40 million using the taxpayer-funded cards, which suggests total council spending of about £100 million at all local authorities."
Kent Online: Council webcasts aren’t a ratings winner
"Audience figures for live webcasts of meetings at County Hall show many are being watched by fewer than 100 people. ... An analysis of data released to the KM Group under the Freedom of Information Act shows 5,766 people watched committee broadcasts as they happened between April 2010 to March this year. ... KCC spends about £20,000 a year streaming live meetings and making them available on its website to view later."
Daily Mail: Royal Mail refuses to tell customer where its post boxes are
Odd, especially since this data is already in the public domain: "A radio presenter who wrote to Royal Mail asking where his nearest post boxes were received an astonishing reply to say: 'Sorry, it's a secret'. ... The extraordinary two-page reply went on to claim that, as Royal Mail is a publicly-owned company, there was a 'significant public interest' in keeping the information private."
BBC Open Secrets: Council objections to publication of spending data
"Ministers have given local authorities a deadline of the end of January to issue online the details of their expenditure on items over £500. The Communities and Local Government department maintains a timeline to display progress towards this. ... But documents obtained by the BBC under freedom of information show some councils have protested to the department about this demand from central government."
countculture: Videoing council meetings revisited: the limits of openness in a transparent council
"Last night, I headed over to Maidenhead for the scheduled council meeting to test this out, and either provide a shining example for other councils, or show that even the most ‘transparent’ council can’t shed the pomposity and self-importance that characterises many council meetings, and allow proper open access."
The video below, less than two minutes long, is the result, and as you can see, they chose the latter course
The video below, less than two minutes long, is the result, and as you can see, they chose the latter course
Information Aesthetics: Urban Open Data: 100 Million 311 Calls in New York Visualized -
"Wired recently published an interesting article titled "What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York [wired.com] digesting some of the insights that can be derived by analyzing more than 100 million 311 calls that have been placed in New York since its inception in March 2003 ... "
Information Aesthetics: Urban Open Data: 100 Million 311 Calls in New York Visualized -
"Wired recently published an interesting article titled "What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York [wired.com] digesting some of the insights that can be derived by analyzing more than 100 million 311 calls that have been placed in New York since its inception in March 2003 ... "
MurderMap: London Homicide Reported Direct from The Old Bailey
"The Murder Map project aims to create the first ever comprehensive picture of homicide in the modern city. On its completion, our online database will contain details of every murder and manslaughter committed in London from the crimes of Jack the Ripper to the present day. It is based on our unique archive of homicide cases – the product of thousands of hours spent by skilled and dedicated crime reporters in the courtrooms of the Old Bailey."
ReadWriteWeb: Facebook’s Places Feature About to Launch
"Facebook's location service 'Places' is speeding towards an imminent launch ... Advertising exec Dave Morgan has argued ... that the rise of location based services, because they are so easy to use and compelling, will suck the advertising life-blood out of local newspapers, radio and journalism."
iPhone app: Food Hygiene
"Check out before you fork out! Now over 130,000 official local authority food hygiene inspection ratings from England and Northern Ireland as published on www.scoresonthedoors.org.uk. But with this app it enables you to get them on the move, find those around you, gives you directions and phone numbers."
Nieman Journalism Lab: Opening up journalism’s boundaries to bring change back in: How Knight and its News Challenge have evolved
"[The Knight Foundation] has sought to innovate journalism in part by stepping away from it, by making a strategic shift from 'journalism' to 'information.' This broadening of boundaries has created crucial space for innovators — from inside and outside journalism — to set forth a reformed view of what journalism is and ought to be. ... If the 'problem' for journalism in an era of digital disruption was the need to find new or refurbished models through which journalism’s core functions and societal benefits could be achieved — to 'meet the information needs of communities,' in the foundation’s common refrain — then Knight was making a break from its past in turning away from faith in industry expertise and toward an acknowledgement that the solutions may well come from the aggregate expertise of a participatory crowd of contributors."
The EveryBlock Blog: New feature: custom locations
"[T]he boundaries of a neighborhood don't necessarily correspond to the boundaries of the area you're interested in ... [W]e've decided to address this problem once and for all, and we're incredibly excited about our new approach. Today, we're launching a feature that puts the control of geographic boundaries in your own hands."
ReadWriteWeb: Yelp Brings First US Augmented Reality App to iPhone Store
"Social review service Yelp has snuck the first Augmented Reality (AR) iPhone app specifically for the US into the iTunes App Store."