Daily Archives: Thursday, July 3, 2014

  • Talking rubbish

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

    One perennial problem in the Easton district of Bristol where I live is fly-tipping, the illegal dumping of waste.

    trade and other waste dumped by communal bin for household waste in Stapleton Road, Easton
    Disgraceful! Trade & other waste dumped by communal bin for household waste in Stapleton Road, Easton

    Some areas – such as Stapleton Road (see above picture) – have persistent problems and last night I gave a short presentation at the latest Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum meeting to try and encourage other residents and those who work in the area to get involved and make Easton a tidier place.

    I’m pleased to say I received whole-hearted support from local councillor Marg Hickman, who is equally concerned about the amount of litter on the streets (are fly-tipping and littering related; does one attract the other? Ed.).

    Flytipping can be reported online using the council’s dedicated report form. Some people use Twitter to do so too, whilst for those with a smartphone various third party applications are available, such as My Council.

    If anyone does draw attention to fly-tipping or litter on Twitter, you might like to add the hashtag #tidybs5. If you live elsewhere in Bristol you might like to adapt the #tidybs* hashtag, replacing the asterisk with the first figure of your postcode.

    Yesterday I did learn prior to the Neighbourhood Forum meeting that persistence pays off: via an email from the city council I learnt that several traders on Stapleton Road are or have been served with fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping by enforcement officers. It’s a start, but I get the impression that fly-tipping will be as hard to eradicate as a Hammer horror film vampire.

    Bristol will be European Green Capital in 2015. Unless it sorts out fly-tipping and other environmental problems in Easton and the city’s other less prosperous areas (like the plague of flies, dust and other industrial pollution in Avonmouth. Ed.), the accolade should be amended to read European Greenwash Capital.

  • Bristol open data initiative launched

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Data, Tech

    open data stickersBristol City Council is working with the Future Cities Catapult and the Connected Digital Economy Catapult on a new open data initiative that will help Bristolians improve their city with the help of local authority data.

    The partners are working together to release Bristol civic data sets such as traffic management and land use databases to citizens. The collaboration will support developers to use the data to create new products and services to improve how the city of Bristol works, making it easier to get around, reduce waste, save energy or improve the city’s air quality.

    Once the data sets are made available online in late summer, citizens and businesses will be invited to explore around one hundred data sets, supported by a series of Catapult-run events and competitions. Bristolians will be supported in testing, prototyping and commercialising their ideas.

    Following a successful initial data release, the Catapults and the Council will then create a schedule to release further useful city data sets in consultation with the developer community. The programme’s outcomes will be shared with local authorities, developers and organisations in other UK cities to spread the benefits to the citizens of other cities.

    This post originally appeared on Bristol Wireless.

  • LibreUmbria@Scuola nominated for Egov 2014 prize

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    News arrived via my inbox this morning that LibreUmbria‘s programme in schools (LibreUmbria@Scuola), which took place in recent months in collaboration with Perugia’s third teaching district (posts passim), has been nominated for this year’s Egov Prize. LibreUmbria is the project that is promoting the use of free and open source software amongst public sector organisations in Italy’s Umbria region.

    Egov Prize logo

    The basic idea behind the Egov Prize has always been the fusion and sharing of good practice which other public sector organisations can use as an example and from which they can benefit. This will be the 10th year the prize will have been awarded.

    LibreUmbria@Scuola aims to raise awareness and promote the use of free software in schools, from the primary level upwards by training parents and teachers who will in turn train others by acting as mentors.

    The LibreUmbria@Scuola project has been implemented in arranging free seminars at schools for parents and teachers, on digital culture topics (the relationship between boys and technology, shared knowledge and free software, security, use of social media, cyberbullying). In addition to the seminars, computer courses in using the LibreOffice productivity suite running on Ubuntu Linux were also provided.