early last week I met with two people from Brent Council Environment & Culture Department to discuss the Civic Reporter ideas and application framework that Comwifinet have been working on. A great opportunity to discuss how open accessible data could further develop participation in the up keep of the Borough. Brent Council considering working with a Made In Brent technology organisation and mobile technologies. Brent Council entertaining the public publishing daily status and performance information online....
The background to all this. Comwifinet had prototyped the Civic Reporter framework which is inspired by other innovative mobile technology projects, such as that implemented by Lewisham and the mySociety ‘Broken Civic Infrastructure’ idea. These similar initiatives all start from the question ‘Would putting pictures of abandoned cars on a map on the internet help people to think again about their role in maintaining a tidy Borough?
[The background to all this....
I have been working with Jon solving some file and print puzzles for the network that he manages. The network has Windows XP and Apple OS X clients and provides services from a Suse server running OpenLDAP for authentication and Samba for file and print.
The little puzzle we have been working on has been incorporating the Apple OS X machines into the authenticated file and print network. Connecting the eMacs to the wider network would provide more services to the users of the machines and give Jon less management and security headaches over the current local users / afp-island that the machines currently live in....
Civic reporter has received an initial ‘thanks but no thanks’ from Brent Council. I’m going to post their analysis of the application and my reponse here. this morning I was at home with the baby. I love being at home in the day, it gives me the chance to stand and watch my neighbourhood go by. I counted five Brent Council branded vehicles go past my house, collecting my green box, then my green bin and later my household wheelie bin....
This story got me posting as I’m a new father and my daughter is breastfed. Sarah was campaigning earlier this week with the NCT in support of their call for legislation to enshrine a woman’s right to breastfeed in public in England. The Scots have such legislation (must have been a devolved competancy) but in England and Wales breastfeeding in public is not protected. Both myself and my partner are in support of this legisation and support the NCT’s campaign....