William Heath’s blog

Personal data: Professionally I want to contribute real broad progress to empowering people online. I see two ways: work with Mydex to put tools in people’s hands for informational self-determination, and build Ctrl-Shift’s work helping organisations understand and benefit from the enormous implications.
UPDATE
Milestones:
- Mydex live service this year (funded, designed, developed) by Dec 2010
- treble [...]

Check out the quality of thinking and dialogue in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: see this exchange for example between the writer Roi Ben-Yehuda and Aziz Abu Sarah from the Center for World Religions. They have some class newspapers in Israel.
Since my own post on boycotting “West Bank” produce I’ve had some intelligent but frankly bruising [...]

Brickworks site 19 May 09 – # 2

Originally uploaded by William Heath

Here’s a place: disused brickworks site, derelict for some years with self-seeded oaks and orchids and a couple of manmade ponds returning to a more natural state. Everything to do here. Probably full of dangerous structures and toxic chemicals…

Dropped in at the Leiston Quaker Meeting on a bright spring Sunday last week. I was, frankly, feeling very down about plans for our co-housing site falling through. I didn’t raise the matter because it seems a complicated and ambitious thing to seek sympathy from strangers over.
After 55 minutes of silence a Friend next [...]

Wanted: quiet landed property suitable for 10-20 compact households sharing some common parts. A good place for a high-tech and “participative arts & crafts” project where people can live, work, and do something wonderful together.
Location: Within two hours of London
Essential: potential for 10-20 separate homes (whether detached, terraced or apartments)
Essential: view, 35 acres+ incl some [...]

It’s quite clear from comments and emails back to me off list that there’s a big appetite for co-housing (ie essentially private dwellings with some shared amenities) and a diversity of interesting people who want to live like that. There dont seem to be enough co-housing projects, and those there are seem to move too [...]

Update: please read this first

Hurrah. Our offer to buy somewhere to live has been accepted. Onwards and upwards, with an incredible release of energy, ideas, thoughts, decisions, things to do, mixed with more than a dash of anxiety.

Cheers for the pictures Steiney!

There’s a lot that’s bugging me at the moment:
- clause 152 of the proposed Coroners and Justice Bill
- absurd EU copyright term extension plans and the mixed quality of my MEPs, from brilliant to fruitcake benefit fraudsters (see below)
- alleged corrupt payments by Experian (which is paid a slice of my council tax) to [...]

Got hauled over to a Nesta “Webank” session on future business models in Internet banking. The Zopa posse were there, currently actually arranging loans to borrowers and offering over 9% to lenders last year. Kubera Money promises to implement an online version of the venerable tradition of Roscas: tiny savings and loan collectives with very [...]