UK Citizens Online Democracy’s (UKCOD) main activity is running the mySociety project, building websites which “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives.”

MySociety are the people behind the great web tools TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP and FixMyStreet (a project similar to one comwifinet were hacking up in the distant past…)

I’ve just been emailed about mySociety’s ‘Free Our Bills’ Campaign. Please go and add your weight to the call for Parliament to publish these documents which are a crucial part of the process of making law in a way that is sensitive to the electronic use over the internet.

David ‘web’ Cameron has already endorsed the campaign. But I’m not about to give his site linkage, so you’ll have to find the video via The All Seeing Eye.

I’ve also just found the beta test version of whatdotheyknow.com which aims to provide a public searchable repository of Freedom of Information Act requests made to public bodies. GREAT IDEA! Now the information made public in FoI requests is made public in a much wider sense. The site is open and searchable. The site helps people to make Freedom Of Information Act requests of public bodies, reminds you when the request is timing out (not that it will of course, our public bodies are quick of the mark with these sort of things!) and make all the information in the request public.

Praise is due.

For some feature enhancements I’d recommend adding something that will take any attachments and process them so they are readable. These public bodies, especially councils, have a habit of replying to electronic messages in the fashion of material messages. It amuses me greatly to see a properly formatted letter, typed out in a word processor… attached to an email with a message saying ‘please read the attachment’. bonkers. So if whatdotheyknow.com could process attachments and display them in the webpage as well as giving us the files to download, that would be great!

“I say a lot of things — millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement“

I’m going to use that defense to cover any statements extracted from me using dubious/borderline interrogation techniques.

I’ve been investigating the feasibility of collecting and publishing final year dissertation projects in book form. I think that this will make a great reminder of our time of study, our political alliances and the friendships that have grown over the years at Goldsmiths. Also it’s such an indulgent, gratuitous act: So Fucking Goldsmiths. My plan is to gather together our dissertations and publish a book (ISBN record and everything) of our works to have it printed and ready for graduation in September.

Print On Demand / Short Run printing is readily accessible and affordable. A run of 100 works out at a per book cost of around a tenner. The result is a quality product too. There are POD books currently on sale in the college bookshop (look for Media Mutandis in Media/Culture) that you can take a look at to see what the finished result would look like.

I hope that I can drum up enough interest to make the project viable as solo-publishing my dissertation would be lonely!

I’ve been busy reviewing and replanning my dissertation project - only five weeks to go until hand-in! I’ve cut a lot out since my proposal last year, tightening my focus and shortening my reading lists. My four papers now look something like this…

• Who Governs in a Networked Society (final draft complete) - My first chapter is concerned with the depoliticisation of government and the politicisation of the social world in a global networked society. In this chapter I explore the networked society thesis (Giddens, Castells) contra globalisation. I draw on Virilio’s real/virtual city dichotomy in order to move towards Hardt & Negri Empire. I am interested in the post-material politics of NSM/NGO and the relationship between these organisations and the de/politicisation in networked society. I conclude with a discussion about the imagination and the affective dimension of the political.
• Free, Libre and Radically Open Communities (in draft) - This paper will consider the hacker identity and hacker social and cultural relations. In exploring this subjects ontology and its relationships with others I will also question the understanding of purpose, of telos, by this subjectivity. Freedom and openness are two central concepts in hackerism and the contemporary social movements it has influenced. My research will lead me to examine critically the political philosophy of hackerism in order to reveal the meaning in these emerging redefinitions of freedom and openness and the challenge they present to the corresponding dominant liberal notions of the same terms.
• Communicative Capitalism and F/los - In my third paper I will explore the political economy of contemporary communicative capitalism and f/los. Here I will draw on the networked society ideas from my first chapter and the hacker work ethic from my second. I am conscious of a dynamic between pragmatism and idealism and how this conditions political economy. I am searching for the `positive possibility’ of f/los and how this, in transmission, may effect our contemporary order.
• A New Politics of Openness? - I am not quite sure how this chapter will fit together yet. I am interested in how the hacker idea of freedom, `what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people in it’ (Stallman) is be realised. McKenzie Wark, author of `A Hacker Manifesto’, in his paper `Escape from the Dual Empire’ wrote “020. The search for a counter strategy to ‘globalization’, if it does not look backwards to the reinstatement of the topographic boundaries of a lost age, looks forward instead to a new topography, in which the topical might hold the power of the digital, rather than being held within its thrall.” I think that the hacker ethic and the open political models of f/los are no longer emergent, existing at the frontiers of our networked society. I contend that they already among us and are radically altering established politics.

I’ve just sent the draft of my first paper to my supervisor and I’ve yet to run it past my Chief Editor (thanks B). I’ll post a PDF when its been reviewed and edited.

“The story of the BBC Micro is one of British innovation; it’s about how one machine inspired a generation of youngsters to use computers,” said Dr Blyth.

The BBC Micro was host to my first computing experiences. According to the BBC, the Science Museum plans an exhibition about the BBC Micro and its legacy in 2009 - I’ll be there.