June 28th, 2010 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
On Friday, the Government announced that it is intending to close up to 75% of the 820 public sector websites it has identified. The announcement coincided with a report from the Central Office of Information (COI) outlining statistics for central government websites. These figures show that 47 websites have cost taxpayers over £127 million in [...]
June 13th, 2010 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
On Thursday, CF Labs launched their latest project – StayPrivate.org – into public beta. This site is designed to make it easier to sign up for the various marketing opt-out services that exist in the UK. There are lots of different opt-out services that exist, all of which have separate sign-up forms and require you [...]
May 24th, 2010 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
We are nearly two weeks into the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat and there seems to be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare for the start of the new legislative programme tomorrow (Tuesday). Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the [...]
April 7th, 2010 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
Unless it escaped your attention, Gordon Brown called the much anticipated UK General Election yesterday. It will take place on May 6th 2010. In line with guidelines for civil service and other public sector employees, I will be curtailing my blogging and tweeting activities until after the election. If I do post anything, it won’t [...]
March 23rd, 2010 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
Just over a year ago I joined CF Labs as one of the developers working on innovation and making data publically available. When I started, Consumer Focus was a pretty new organisation still getting to grips with its role and getting everything into place so it could undertake its duties properly. In the middle of [...]
February 6th, 2010 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
As some of you may remember, a few months ago I waded in on the MP expenses controversy with a crowd-sourcing website for putting together a list of what they all claimed. The Guardian (and others) produced their own websites that did a similar job and generally worked better. Since then, there have been further [...]
January 31st, 2010 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
Most people will be aware of the concept of a hack day – a number of designers and/or developers getting together for a day to build “cool stuff”. These sorts of days happen on a regular basis and quite a few interesting projects have come out of them. On Friday, Charlie and I attended a [...]
December 20th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
Photo: lewishamdreamer (from Flickr) The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening. The focus today is on the cause of the incident and [...]
December 15th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. 1 Comment.
It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate.org website. Sometimes I [...]
November 18th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
BREAKING: Information commissioner examining whether staff of mobile firm sold customer details (from BBC News) -which mobile phone company? # Staff from a mobile phone company sold customer data for substantial sums – ICO to prosecute those involved – http://bit.ly/tV55X # RT @BrandRepublic: Sad day here. Media Week and Revolution magazines to close. Haymarket restructures [...]
