currently working on some mapping extensions to the Brent East Campaigning website. I plan to show a map of the Borough of Brent and to overlay various political informations such as the elected representatives for the wards both at local and national level. I’ll begin with a map and just mash in some datasources that I will build myself. I need to build them by hand as Brent Council supply only a limited amount of information in machine readable format and what is made available in not geo-coded so it is unknown where the information refers to.

when I’ve done with the basic overlays I’ll drag in other information from places such as QPARA, brenteast.net brentbrain and display headlines from those sites as news feeds.

I will look at the wirelesslondon tools for building such a spaticalinformationportal and see if I can get them running.

what’s happening with the stop the tower campaign? I’ve not received any emails from Barney nor have I picked up other campaign materials in the QP area these last weeks. i have seen that the Liberal Democrats are making a local election issue out of the QP tower plan - and with Cllr Davies being against, Cllr Nerva chairing a panel and Cllr Sayer making the decision, political representation from Team Red is lacking a bit too. As for Team Blue and Green I don’t know where they stand - but there is the opportunity to have an impact of these candidates over the coming weeks with some campaigning.

I have resurrected the Brent East Campaigning blog that I ran during the 2005 general election. it can be found at http://bec.robdyke.com - there I am posting and commenting on the topics that candidates seize upon as issues to campaign on in the Brent East area. but the site also has a wider purpose of supporting other/any campaigns in the Brent / Brent east area. stopthetower.co.uk is one of those campaigns. I have linked to the official site and the old blogger dot com website. but the official website is lacking in content and updates. I would like to help in bringing the stopthetower website up to date in order that this resource could be used as an information resource and campaigning tool both now during the run up to the local elections and in immediate aftermath (?) of the count.

I am prepared to do this in two ways. one I will upload copies of recent news letter and other articles to the website - to populate it, give it some bones and help the resource get started. I am then prepared to train some people in how to use the site and the tools. Some have had training and I am prepared to give others more in order that they can embrace and be empowered by these internet tools in their campaigning. Others who have used email services like HotMail will already have the skills to use the tools. I can help and support the use of them and the use of them will augment and extend the traditional methods of campaigning that are currently in use.

Read the Drupal README if you want to know what it is. Otherwise I’ll assume you understand the concepts of a FLOSS modular CMS/web-application generator in a LAMP environment.

Aspects of drupal of relevance to the IP Community Commission

• Aggregator: syndicating content
• Archive: view content by date
• Blog: a blog for every user
• Comment: allow comments on content
• Taxonomy: categories and classification schemes

The gallery has the photos that I took at the 22C3 event. Enjoy the slideshow.

Custom googlemaps info posted to the wikwikwah following 22C3. I learned a lot at a session called ‘Learning Javascript with the Googlemaps API. As I don’t code ™ this session was just what I had been looking for.

All I need to do now is … dun dun dar!…something with it!