Richard's Kingdom

The Government may be about to propose some misconceived, illiberal and anti-competitive copyright-enforcement policies in a Communications Bill green paper. The Open Rights Group has a briefing up on the proposals and their concerns about them. In summary the suggestion seems to be that UK web-surfers should be prevented from accessing websites that major corporate [...]

Last week I attended a public meeting about the UK Government’s plans to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists. It seems the proposals are something of a token effort and the meeting highlighted several ways to shine lights into more of this industry’s dark corners. Speaking as one who lobbies in a volunteer capacity I’m [...]

This session was a masterclass in effective lobbying run by Phil Booth and Terri Dowty of truth2power. The first obvious step in lobbying your MP is to find out who they are and how to contact them. Thanks to the wonderful folk at mysociety this can be done simply by visiting write to them and [...]

UPDATE 2012-04-05 16:00 BST: I had my legislative proposals confused. Turns out there are two separate sets of measures being proposed at present. This session was on the forthcoming Communications Green Paper not the Communications Capabilities Development Programme. I’ve updated the post title and content accordingly. My thanks to the [org-discuss] mailing-list subscriber who pointed [...]

I attended the local-groups session at ORGCon last weekend. I made a few notes. Then I set up a local ORG group in Sheffield. We’re holding our first meeting on Monday (and if you’re able to you should come!) If I can do this in a week you can do it in your area too. [...]