Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Four Makerspaces and a Shed

    Over the past three months, I’ve been doing site visits to maker and hacker spaces across Scotland. For the first phase of In the Making, we’re surveying existing facilities in the UK to identify what opportunities and challenges they might present to disabled users. Two Types of Space It quickly became clear that makerspaces fell…

  • TICTeC 2015: Revisiting the Myth of Digital Democracy

    I recently read Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy [1], in which he tears down the notion that the Internet has significantly democratised participation in the political sphere. I particularly enjoyed his data driven, economics approach to the issue, which reminded me of the methods used in Freakonomics [2] and my very favourite example of counter-intuitive cause…

  • TICTeC 2015: Take-Home Thoughts on Civic Tech

    At the end of March I attended the first TICTeC conference, run by mySociety in London. If you haven’t come across mySociety yet, you will almost certainly have come across one of their websites, including TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and YourNextMP. They now have a research programme aimed at understanding how effective these tools are, part of which includes running an…

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