2019 update:
LocalDirectgov and the underlying datasets have now been replaced. This means the tool was getting out of date and inaccurate, so I’ve switched it off.
Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website.
Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back!
There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed for 6 months (original launch date was expected to be March 2009), and going significantly over budget (costing a total of £2.8 million), you’d expect the site to be the best thing ever developed.
Yesterday, Richard Pope and I launched WhatTheyClaimed.com, a site aimed at digitising and collating all of the data from MPs expenses.
The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, but when Richard and I realised that MPs expenses were being published, we realised we could make use of the same codebase with a few minor changes. I need to note at this point that the website was a personal project and not supported by Consumer Focus.
2014 update:
The Local Government Association funded and launched their own version of this service called TweetyHall. Our version has now been turned off.
A quick update this week!
Last weekend I was pleased to launch CllrTweeps. The new site, inspired by TweetMinster, aims to list every local councillor in the UK who is on Twitter. After our first week online, we have already tracked down and verified the first 100 councillors using the service.
Unless you’ve been in a cave (or outside of the UK) for the last few days, you’ll know that we’ve been experiencing the fun of a ‘severe snow event’. The exact definition of a severe snow event remains unanswered, and I’ll leave the debate over whether what we’ve been experiencing is severe to another time. What is important, however, is that a large number of schools have been closed because of the snow. The BBC reported earlier that over 500 schools were closed today in Wales alone.