Over the years, MySociety, an e-democracy project of the charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, whose aim is to build “socially focused tools with offline impacts”, has designed some great online tools. By way of an example, these include: TheyWorkForYou to enable electors to track the work of their constituency MPs; WriteToThem to help electors write […]
A project to provide the town centre of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire with free wifi is on track to meet its target fund after setting out to be “crowdfunded”, according to an E-Government Bulletin report. The “Make Mansfield Your HotSpot” project has been developed by Mansfield Business Improvement District, a partnership between the council and the […]
About this time 10 years ago, Bristol Wireless made its initial tentative appearance online. The very first item we posted online was the holding page (complete with the obligatory typo! Ed.) in the image below. The image comes courtesy of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, which regularly trawls the web to archive its constantly changing face. The […]
The chief scribe recently took part in some smart city sessions organised in Bristol by Knowle West Media Centre, so he was interested to learn of recent smart cities developments in Italy. According to the EU’s Joinup open source news site, open source software is a key element in many of the Smart City projects […]
The following email has been received today in the lab from the privacy and anti-censorship campaigners, the Open Rights Group (ORG): Hi all, As I mentioned in my previous email ORG are launching a big drive for new members. The plan is to launch our campaign to fund a Legal Officer on Thursday 1st of […]
Last Friday saw the launch of Windows 8, the latest “best Windows ever” (not again; isn’t that marketing slogan getting rather hackneyed after nearly 20 years? Ed.) release from the Beast of Redmond, backed by a marketing budget rumoured to be $1.5-1.8 bn. However, the launch was not without its problems for MS, as reported […]
Our Digital Planet is an exhibition showcasing the positive opportunities and developments that have been made possible by the internet. The exhibition is being sponsored by Nominet Trust, the charity established by Nominet (the organisation which administers the .uk domain names. Ed.) and will be in Broadmead – between Boots and Marks and Spencer (map […]
On Wednesday evening, the families and friends of Sam Rossiter and Naomi Smyth, plus a few Bristol Wireless ne’er-do-wells, paid a fond farewell to the couple as they sailed off into the future under the Redcliffe bascule bridge to the strains of The Ambling Band. Sam has been a Bristol Wireless volunteer of many years’ […]
Fed up with the ancient telephone exchange and poor quality service from the UK’s largest telecommunications provider – BT, the villagers of Kettleholm in Dumfries and Galloway have produced the following video, which we trust readers will enjoy. Hat tip: Baskers
Wikimania is an annual international conference for users of the various projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation (e.g. Wikipedia and its sister projects). It includes presentations and discussions include Wikimedia Foundation projects, other wikis, open source software, free knowledge and free content, and the different social and technical aspects which relate to these topics. It’s […]
A new e-petition has appeared on the Government’s e-petitions site entitled ‘Migrate all government IT to Linux based systems’ (as it’s in a good cause, we’ll ignore the original petitioner’s woeful lack of a hyphen between Linux and based in the title. Ed. 🙂 ) The body of the petition reads as follows: Responsible department: […]
Yesterday Bristol’s Evening Post, the city’s newspaper of record (really? Ed.), carried the news of Bristol Wireless’ shortlisting for the Santander Social Enterprise Awards (which were being organised locally in conjunction with the Quartet Community Foundation). We’d originally applied for the award after a report on them was spotted by a keen-eyed Bristol Wireless volunteer […]
Back in October, we gave very early notice (news passim) of the 2012 Flossie Unconference taking place in London on 25th and 26th May 2012 at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS (map). News has now arrived that the submissions deadlines has been extended to 19th March 2012 and further details […]
Greeklug, the Greek free software advocacy group, has donated a free and open source software computer lab to a children’s shelter in the village of Filyro, north of Thessaloniki, Joinup reports. Apart from providing installation and hardware, the group is also organising training courses for the children. “We contacted the orphanage, offering our expertise, our […]
Our friends at Easton’s Kebele Community Cooperative have asked us to let our readers know that they’re running a computer class starting this Friday 20th January 2012 from 6 pm to 7 pm in the Kebele Library (map). According to the Kebele website, the tuition comprises: Basic computer information and getting to know some of […]
It’s not very often we look at education on this blog in spite of our previous involvements with LTSP (news passim) and open source use petitions (news passim), but the past couple of days have provided a couple of interesting stories that deserve examination. Firstly, The Guardian has launched a digital literacy campaign. Whilst the […]
2012 is fast approaching and there are two reasons for celebration in the New Year. Firstly, the United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives as an acknowledgement of the fundamental role of cooperatives in promoting the socio-economic development of hundreds of millions of people and have released a little […]
One of the barriers frequently mentioned to getting involved in editing Wikipedia is the clunky editing interface; indeed it has come up at sessions attended by Bristol Wireless volunteers cunningly disguised as Wikipedians (news passim). Your scribe has some vague memory of the topic of the clunky editor even coming up in the course of […]
On Monday the advance crew – by now known as the tat-down team and consisting mostly of Bristol Wireless volunteers – arrived back tired but satisfied from the rural Barncamp site up the Wye Valley. Our journey began the previous Wednesday afternoon, when the advance crew got to site after a frantic best part of […]
Yesterday, adelayde posted the following email to the Hacktionlab mailing list. Hi all, Am very pleased to announce that the booking system is now on-line at: http://registration.hacktivista.net If you’re intending to come please get on over there and book as soon as possible to secure your place. There are limited places this year as there […]