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The Welsh town of Monmouth is to become the focus of a large-scale collaborative ‘Wikipedia’ project in the first move of its kind anywhere in the world, supported by the local county council. “Monmouthpedia” is the brainchild of former fine arts student and graphic designer John Cummings. It will create Wikipedia articles in multiple languages including [...]

The UK is falling behind the leading European nations in implementing a national 3-D mapping framework, a leading practitioner has told E-Government Bulletin. Carsten Rönsdorf, corporate data manager at the UK’s national mapping agency Ordnance Survey, told E-Government Bulletin the UK is “quite a bit behind” several other European countries and parts of the rest of [...]

The Greater London Authority has defended its reuse of electronic vote counting for the 2012 mayoral and assembly member elections following the renewal of allegations from one analyst that such systems are less secure and not worth their cost. The vote will be complex: on 3 May, Londoners will cast four votes on three ballot papers, [...]

A project which is likely to represent at least part of the high-tech future for the UK’s public libraries following a year of smaller branch closures is on time and under budget for delivery in 2013. Birmingham City Council’s £190 million central library and archive redevelopment celebrated its topping out about eight weeks ago and [...]

Uncertainty as to when to make the move; and lack of help from outsourcing suppliers are among barriers cited by local authorities to sharing communications networks with other public bodies prior to joining the emerging Public Services Network (PSN), delegates heard at last week’s Socitm 2011 annual conference in Birmingham. Simon Norbury, PSN Local Government Transition [...]

Judging criteria for a second series of European digital inclusion awards are set to be unveiled by the European Commission, three years after the first international awards were presented at a digital inclusion conference in Vienna. UK winners under the 2008 scheme included Milton Keynes Council and the Welsh Assembly Government. Plans for a new scheme [...]

Eastbourne Borough Council is the only UK local authority prizewinner at this year’s UK IT Industry Awards run by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, in recognition of the council’s agile working project. The project saw staff moving from two locations to a single building from March 2011 in a move planned to save the [...]

In the wake of the government’s new cloud computing strategy published last month, how far and fast is the public sector likely to move, and what results can we expect? Andrew Carr (pictured), sales and marketing director at Bull UK & Ireland, has the answers. EGB: What are the benefits of cloud computing for the public [...]

A prototype system which displays all requests to Birmingham city Council’s customer relations management centre onto an interactive map of the city has demonstrated a demand for more detailed data of this kind, one of the project’s leaders said this week. The Birmingham Civic Dashboard was created by local digital agency Mudlark on behalf of Digital [...]

Judging is set to end this week for a major US government challenge to find the best smartphone apps that help people access local public data to improve their lives. Top prize in the contest is 30,000 US Dollars in development funding, with eight other prizes on offer totalling a further 70,000 Dollars. During the live [...]