I’ve assembled my first ever Hackintosh, following a variant of this ‘recipe’. I’m rather pleased that it booted first time. Now I need to think of a name for it. (At the moment, it’s named after its case: Phenom.) Continue reading
I enjoy the weekly briefing from the Scottish Community Alliance – 6 interesting and challenging articles about how we can make our society work better, leavened with the occasional salutary tale, and always a lot of potential learning. This week’s briefing is no exception. Here’s some highlights:
Enjoy!
Until now, I’ve had one Twitter handle for both my research and my personal tweets, namely @myceliumme_CC. This handle was also used to auto-tweet both from this blog and my personal blog. It’s now time to split these streams:
There’s nothing to stop you following both!
Well it’s time to leave Napier for 6 months to pursue other personal interests. I’ll be back in October to work on the IL-DEM project with Peter Cruickshank and Hazel Hall.
For now a huge thank-you to friends and colleagues in the School of Computing/IIDI, principally in the Centre for Social Informatics.
A brief interlude from my non-work life. I guess that we might encounter some local government manifestations on our travels.
Elly and I have been spinning at the wonderful LifesCycle for four years to help keep ourselves fit enough to enjoy exploring the world on bikes. We are going off on our adventures later this year, but we know we are incredibly lucky to have the time and the security to do that. LifesCycle has been a strong supporter of Mercy Corps and we would like to add a little bit to their support of people suffering around the world, particularly refugees. If you have two minutes, this video will give you a little bit of insight into the people Mercy Corps supports. Continue reading
The Scottish Government has responded to questions raised by CC members at a fairly recent Fairer Scotland event. Click the thumbnail to download the full PDF.
If you have any queries about the responses, it would be best to contact Kristoffer Boesen or Lynn Sharp of the Improvement Service (IS). In the meantime, I’m very pleased to see mentions of the work by Peter Cruickshank and me, specifically
My better half pointed out recently that I described the Scottish Government as the top/first level, and Community Councils as the bottom/third level. This is interesting for two reasons:
Well I have my name on another paper – but not as author. Professor Hazel Hall and Robert Irvine have published a review of literature around success factors in information systems project management. Hazel has blogged about it here.
Despite the CC websites I run not being all they could be, I think I’m working hard enough. I’ve just made my 300th post on Leith Central’s website, my 75th on Leith Harbour and Newhaven’s site and my 69th on New Town & Broughton’s site.
The averages are around 7, 4 and 4 posts per month, respectively. One reason for the difference is that Leith Central publishes draft minutes, so that a some account of its meetings is online within a week or so of the meeting. I think this is much better than waiting for minutes to be ratified at the next monthly meeting.
The Scottish Government’s ‘Fairer Scotland’ national discussion has been running for a few months now. As the Scottish Community Alliance put it, this is an attempt to crowdsource policy. There’s a series of events around Scotland, at which the Scottish Government ‘wants to work with a broad mix of people across the country to prioritise practical steps that can be taken to create a fairer Scotland’.
But as well as talking directly with people across Scotland, the SG also wants to work with those who (should) most closely represent communities: community councillors. As Marco Biagi (Minister for Local Government and Community Empowerment) put it, key questions are
