Category: Civic Technology
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Notwestminster 2017: Remaking a Maker Day
When I started a survey of hackathons as part of the Ardler Inventors project last year, Notwestminster’s Maker Day was the first event I visited. Bringing together a mixed audience of councillors, local government employees, activists, coders and academics together to imagine different futures for local democracy was a perfect fit for our project. Afterwards,…
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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…
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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…