Tag Archives: government

Signed the PDFreaders Petition

We, the undersigned, hereby state that we expressly and unequivocally oppose the advertising of proprietary software products on government websites. Such advertising breaches impartiality and encourages citizens to employ technologies that unnecessarily restrict their freedom. The role of government is … Continue reading

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Top 10 Benefits of Mailing List Software

Particularly around local government, but also some not-for-profits and universities, I’m trying to persuade people to stop using huge Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) lists that they keep in their address book and switch over to using mailing list manager software. … Continue reading

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Respond to the European Consultation on Library RFID

As you may remember, our co-op is working on various RFID (radio tags instead of barcodes, basically) extensions for Koha. One of the main ethical concerns about RFID is privacy – if done wrong, it could become quite easy to … Continue reading

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Funding Networking, Coops and SocEnt

As an aside to yesterday’s Another Network Begins note, I should mention that one of the challenges of running any inter-business project is paying for it. It surprises some people that many great cooperative projects are running on very small … Continue reading

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Would you help to Connect SouthWest England?

Martha Lane Fox, the recently appointed Champion for Digital Inclusion visited Bristol recently and met Bristol Wireless Community Cooperative. I follow Digital Inclusion topics, but I only heard about that after the event because of a technical fault on ConnectingBristol.org, … Continue reading

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Oh no! Ex-MP Richard Allan hired to make the EU more Facebook-friendly

As you may remember from my Google-WEF rant a few years ago, I strongly believe that governments should regulate private corporations and not the other way round. It is part of our job as business owners to try to stay … Continue reading

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Digital Britain Report: first glance

The Digital Britain Report was published on 16 June 2009. I only got time to look at it quickly recently because this is one of the co-op AGM seasons. At first glance, it misses the mark. It doesn’t do anything … Continue reading

Posted in Cooperatives, GNU/Linux, SPI, ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

New #ukgovOSS Action Plan

Earlier this week, Tom Watson, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary, published the Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan. It’s had a pretty mixed reaction, with mild scepticism (niq’s soapbox: Is gov.uk going open-source?) being the average reaction from … Continue reading

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Recent Events: London LinuxExpo, Toronto Free Software and Open Source Symposium, Public Sector Online, Get Online Day, the Global Financial Crisis, c&binet

Today’s the last day for the Gov.UK Consultation on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. I didn’t get to LinuxExpo, partly because of Monday Machine-Mangling Madness but I saw LinuxExpo 2008 — Robert Castelo from the Drupal point-of-view. I also … Continue reading

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Report on Shape the future of social enterprise in the South West 4 Sep 2008

I went to this event a few weeks ago. The immediate outcome is the call for expressions of interest in RISE-SW’s projects. The deadline is next Monday (29th September) at 12 noon, so get emailing if you’re interested in them. … Continue reading

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