BCCDIY

Birmingham City Council spent a lot of money on a new website. It was a bit crap. Then they said that one of the reasons it had cost so much was because moving content from one system to another is a big deal and you have to pay a lot of people to do it (they were doing it manually, copy-paste style), and they couldn't have things like RSS feeds because it would all be a bit expensive and difficult. So over breakfast I scraped the site and built a bunch of the missing features, then over a two week period collaborated with a few other folk to create a wish list for what a council site could and should be, the results ending up as BCCDIY.

It was a two week experiment, so it's shaky in places, and generally unsupported. I left it online as a thing of interest. Work continued on the idea with DIY Council, but that never saw the light of day - essentially taking the idea and applying it to all British councils.