Jack Thurston

Category: politics

London’s Mayoral elections: maxmising my voice by strategic use of preference voting

I want Ken Livingstone to be re-elected as Mayor of London. I believe that as a politician he is a cut above any of the other candidates and has the experience and record of achievement that entitle him to a third term of office. I have even made a small donation of £50 to his [...]

Spot the difference

Is America ready for an oven-ready President? It’s all good!

What I learned from a day locked inside Google HQ

I spent Saturday at “barcampUKgovweb” and met a very interesting group of people who care about how government behaves online. Among the 60 or so participants, there was a roughly even split between people working for government, people working for companies and people who are - for want of a better term - civic hackers.

Comedy flashback: Chris Rock on the Black President

With Barack Obama neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, it’s worth recalling a virtuoso performance by comedian Chris Rock back in 1996 when Colin Powell was rumoured to be considering a presidential bid. Have things changed much since then? Could Rock’s cynicism about white people saying they’ll vote for a black [...]

Can you tell Gordo from Dave?

Many Eyes is a web-based data visualisation tool that is still in alpha but already looks impressive. It’s very simple. You cut and paste data (numbers or text) and then choose from a variety of data visualisation tools to make your dataset come to live. We hope to be doing some cool things with it [...]