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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
October 6th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. 2 Comments.
The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit recently?!). However yesterday they took on a new tact: they appear to have decided to bring [...]
September 8th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back! There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed [...]
September 7th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
This is a bit different to my usual posts – but I felt this had to be said. Tonight, I had the misfortune of watching what has to be the second worst piece of reporting I’ve ever seen from the BBC (unfortunately ,the first also came from the same programme last year). Panorama has to be [...]
March 6th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
Earlier today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin, Robin Christopherson from UK charity AbilityNet gave a talk on website accessibility. I’ve seen quite a few different talks and sessions on website accessibility and understand how important this topic is. This talk however really hit home – Robin is blind and gave the [...]
February 3rd, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. 3 Comments.
Unless you’ve been in a cave (or outside of the UK) for the last few days, you’ll know that we’ve been experiencing the fun of a ‘severe snow event’. The exact definition of a severe snow event remains unanswered, and I’ll leave the debate over whether what we’ve been experiencing is severe to another time. [...]
January 24th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. No Comments.
This week it feels like a new phase in social media and the internet has begun. The beginning of the week saw America inaugurate a technology-savvy president, who, along with his team, appears to understand the importance of technology and the internet. Throughout last year, Barack Obama and his team made fantastic use of social [...]
