And then we had Stuart Harrison (also known as @pezholio) up to talk to us about Twitterplan.

I’ve talked about this before, so I’m likely to skip at least some of my notes, but there was still plenty of stuff there which wasn’t covered in that original post…

Twitterplan

Lichfield Council originally set up a twitterstream called @LDC Planning which has 69 followers and shows the planning applications in Lichfield, but this prompted the question, how do you get only the planning applications you are interested in?

Using the API from Planning Alerts, which pulls out planning information from 321 local authorities, he was able to set up Twitter Plan, as an alternative method for those that find Twitter to be more instant and engaging than email.

Stuart then carried out a live demonstration of Twitterplan, signing someone up to the service — about the first time in the day anyone had tried to do anything online and had found that it worked. Now we’ll just have to wait and see whether @skepticmike reports anything back…

Other Bits

But he also insisted that while APIs are becoming more and more important, it isn’t just about Twitter Plan (lovely though it is). There’s Rate My Place which is a one stop shop for food safety information (albeit currently only for Staffordshire, making it slightly less use to me), but there’s also They Work For You, which you can use to keep track of your MPs and MSPs and so on and Openly Local which is much the same thing for local councils but at a much earlier stage (so far only 45 councils are included).

However, if one of the councils currently included is relevant to you, you can pick out details of individual councillors, including their committee memberships, a declaration of interests, party information, and a link back to the official page. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on…