Like most participants I came away from UKGovCamp this weekend fizzing with ideas and enthusiasm. I’ll post my thoughts over the next few weeks about various parts of the weekend. Firstly, I wanted to look at the morning session I attended on Saturday, which was co-hosted by Anthony Zacharzewski of the Democratic Society and Catherine Howe from Public-i.

The session was based around the We Live Here work they are doing at the moment on the Creative Councils programme funded by Nesta. We were asked to look at the ways that neighbourhoods can be viewed as networks of networks and especially how characterising them in this way can refresh democratic engagement.

So, not lacking in ambition then.

(more…)

At the end of March I will be taking voluntary redundancy from Birmingham City Council – and Digital Birmingham – and moving on to work for myself. Well, for as long as I can stand the boss I will, anyway.

I joined Digital Birmingham a little under four years ago from Aston Pride. There I’d been community wireless network manager in charge of technical delivery for the Computers in the Home project. (more…)

getgood

(Nicky Getgood)

I've just seen a supposed young 'rioter' sucking his thumb. It's the saddest fucking thing I've ever seen. :'-( #birminghamriots On 9-8-2011 19:55:58 from TweetDeck

(more…)

Recently I’ve been doing some work with Mudlark on a data vizualisation project. Matt Watkins, their lead technologist, suggested that I might like to subscribe to Flowing Data, a daily newsletter with illustrations of different data viz work.

It’s well worth subscribing to. My favourite recent post had a link to the video below which demonstrates the Bubble Sort algorithm by means of Hungarian Folk Dance.

This was created at Sapientia University in Tirgu Mures (Marosvásárhely), Romania. They have their own YouTube channel as well as Facebook page. And really, what’s not to like?

Yesterday there was a fair bit of comment on Twitter about how 2011 is the sum of 11 consecutive prime numbers.

Which was nice.

The entrance doors to Kirkconnel Parish Church

© Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence (more…)

A friend texted me today and asked what the chances are of a group of seven people picking names in their office Secret Santa without anybody choosing themselves. A clean draw, so to speak.

Now, there are a number of ways that you can try and work this out, but I think the easiest to follow is by thinking of the problem in terms of the number of permutations of the possible outcomes.

In my friend’s office, the first person to draw a name out has 7 possible names to choose from, then the second person has six names, the third person has five names and so on.

(more…)

Some years ago I spent a lovely week with some friends on a tour around Transylvania. Our guide, Ramona, told us on a number of occasions that the scenery we were seeing was lovely, but that her favourite place to go walking was Maramureş. So this year I decided to spend a week there. I got back in touch with Ramona and she agreed to put a tour together.

A view of the Maramureş countryside, looking across from Breb to the Rooster's Crest (Creasta Cocoşului)

Maramureş is a county of Romania that lies within Transylvania and is in the North of the country near the border with the Ukraine. It consists of a series of river valleys and has, until now, largely resisted modern life and retained its rural traditions. It is common for both men and women to wear traditional dress and at this time of year most people are working in the fields, scything the meadows and raking up the grasses into the distinctive haystacks that scatter themselves across the undulating hills.
(more…)

After writing about how many Panini stickers collectors should expect to buy to fill a book  I’ve had a fair few comments about it.  Greg Newman brought John Crace’s article in The Guardian to my attention where he talks about “the four-yearly great Panini conspiracy theory.”  The conspiracy being that Panini don’t distribute the stickers evenly, so you have to buy even more of them to complete your set.

As evidence, he cites Chris Taylor, whose “album is now about two-thirds full and I’ve already ended up with a whole load of Lee Young-Pyos, Hameur Bouazzas and Vince Grellas“.  He then compares the fact that he has never even seen a Thierre Henri, whereas  Chris has got six.  Which is an opening for swapsies if I ever heard one.

(more…)

Yesterday I was over at my sister’s, and her lad was excited because he had the new South Africa World Cup 2010 Panini sticker book. He had also bought four packets, each with five stickers in them, and I had the important job of unpeeling them so that he could put them in the album.

There are 638 stickers to collect in total and it made me wonder how many stickers you would expect to have to buy so that you had a complete set. I was interested in how many you would need to buy without doing swapsies with anybody and on the premise that there were an equal number of each sticker and that they were randomly distributed.

(more…)

The government responded to the snappily titled Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey consultation last week. One of the results of this is the opening up of the OS Open Space Application Programming Interface (API)

This means that lots of us will now have access to embed Ordnance Survey mapping into our blog posts. Just like I’ve done below, with the arrow pointing to Moseley Exchange. And to be honest it wasn’t too difficult to do.

(more…)