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 [...]
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 [...]
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 27th, 2009 by Dafydd Vaughan. 1 Comment.
When you move into a new area, how do you find out about the community you are going to be living in. How do you find out about the community groups, the local services, the bus times. Some of the more technology savvy amongst us might look towards the web in the hope that the information is [...]
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 [...]
