The people at MySociety have, once again, stepped into the gaping communications void left by local government in the UK. An encouraging point, though, is that central government funded it.
Neighbourhood Fix-It is simple:
- Something’s broken in your local area, so you visit www.neighbourhoodfixit.com
- Enter your post-code, press Go.
- The site shows a detailed map of the street in question. Click the location of the problem.
- Describe the problem (e.g. sunken man hole), enter your details and click Submit.
- The site sends your report to the relevant local authority.
Brilliant! Inevitably, a good number of local councils will fail to see why Neighbourhood Fix-It is important and many will ignore the reports, at first. Conversations with other people suggest that my experience of contacting local councils, particularly by email, is typical: i.e. they’re slow, overly formal and slapdash.
Of course, WriteToThem is now taken seriously by many Members of Parliament and Neighbourhood Fix-It is likely to gain similar acceptance by local authorities, within time.
Well done to all at MySociety, not least Chris Lightfoot who, sadly, died recently.
England has some of the most varied accents and dialects of any country in the world. In fact, the British Isles as a whole are blessed with colour and variety in their spoken languages. Multiple invasions and migrations over the centuries have given us truly regional forms of speech.
The tax funded British Library has put together an audio archive of these accents and dialects. Why, then, do they restrict access by making them available only in the proprietary WMA format? To make it worse, you can only stream the audio!
Jonathan Robinson is the curator in charge of the collection; time to write an email, I think.
Via Ray Girvan.
Wolverhampton doesn’t have much in the way of decent local media, particularly on the web. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
I tried to find out who was standing for the General Election in Wolverhampton. A Google search came up with nothing. So, I’ve set up Wolverhampton Politics. Depending how things go, I’d like to keep it going after the election, and provide some scrutiny of our city council!
I’m going to mail each candidate to see if they’ll give me an interview. I want to know what they plan, as individuals, to do for Wolverhampton; not what their leaders tell them to think. It’d also be interesting to know what they’ll do for Wolverhampton even if they aren’t elected … surely they’re not just cynically pretending to care so they get all the trappings of office!
Let me know what you think.
www.wolverhamptonpolitics.co.uk