Daily Archives: Monday, March 16, 2015

  • Highlighting a foul practice

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    Dog fouling is one of the banes of modern life; it’s filthy, a health hazard and – as any local councillor will tell you – a permanent source of correspondence for them from the electorate.

    Over in Bedminster someone has been patrolling the streets and highlighting the problem of dog fouling by spraying the canine visiting cards left in public places with yellow paint, as shown in the example below from Stillhouse Lane.

    dog poo sprayed yellow

    Over in BS5, there’s someone else who also goes round the Easton and Redfield areas with a spray can of paint attacking dog faeces, in this case spraying them fluorescent green.

    Bristolians can report dog fouling online to the City Council, who respond quickly to the laziness of dog owners who cannot be bothered to clean up after their pets.

    In closing here’s a final reminder to those who let their dogs foul the streets and don’t clean it up: it’s an offence that could land you with a fine of £80, which might be a little more inconvenient than stooping and scooping. 🙂

  • Bristol City Council & open standards – more

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

    BCC logoFollowing the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light.

    It was all sparked by a discussion on Twitter between myself and Alex, a leading member of the Bristol & Bath Linux Users’ Group (BBLUG).

    It all revolved around what was really meant by the phrase “not fully digital” in respect of PDF files.

    My speculation was that if text documents are scanned, these are usually converted to image-based PDFs with which the screen readers used by blind and visually impaired people can have problems.

    It turned out this was a good point, but not the real reason.

    The latter was supplied by Gavin Beckett, BCC’s Chief Enterprise Architect, who actually responded to my FoI request. It seems Gavin’s main reason for describing PDFs as “not fully digital” is that PDF is basically an attempt to make electronic files emulate paper. The move by the council away from PDF to HTML when responding to citizens is that more mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) are now being used by the public to communicate with the local authority and the latter wishes to provide the same – i.e. “fully digital” experience to all.

    Finally Gavin promised to follow up with his colleagues my gripe about using MS formats for responding to FOI requests. He conceded this was one example where PDF would be better.