March 2012 – Simon Whitehouse

Month: March 2012

BCU – Open Data Presentation

March 25, 2012 by siwhitehouse·0 Comments

When I was at BCU the other week I gave a presentation to Dave Harte‘s MA in Social Media students about open government data. We spoke about why open government data is a relevant topic for public organisations at the moment. Then we looked at different approaches to exploit the possibilities of open data, and I spoke about some of my experiences of doing this with Digital Birmingham. Finally we discussed why open data was a relevant topic for a course about social media.

Because I was worried this was all going to be a bit dry, I started off by showing them this video by Mark Flood.

Prison related blogs

March 16, 2012 by siwhitehouse·2 Comments

This week I went along to help out at a couple of sessions at Birmingham City University. It was a lot of fun. One of the teams of online journalism students are going to be doing a prison related project and I spoke to their editor about online sources. I thought it might be useful if I wrote a post that referenced them too.

There are a number of organisations who campaign for better conditions in prison. The main national ones are the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust. Frances Crook from the Howard League has a very good and informative blog.