Tony Hirst is an academic in the Department of Communication and Systems at the Open University,[1] but better known for the OUseful Blog[2] on practical applications of Open Data.
In February 2009, Hirst and colleague Joss Winn, established WriteToReply, to re-publish the UK Government's Digital Britain Interim Report in a way that allowed readers to comment on each paragraph. This was among a number of experiments to promote greater online public participation in government consultations.[3]
In March 2009, Hirst created a technique for extracting and presenting subtitles generated from Twitter status updates in SubRip (*.srt) format[4]
Hirst won the 2011 "Open Up" contest for his ideas about the use of UCAS data.[5] The Open Up contest was run by TSO (formerly "The Stationery Office", a publishing company that supplies the UK Government) and came with a £50,000 development fund to enable the idea[6]
Hirst was described as "brilliant" by The Guardian data blog for his work analysing the use of twitter by journalists.[7][8]
Hirst has been an academic adviser and expert contributor to the BBC World Service programme Click, formerly Digital Planet. [9] [10]
He was co-founder of the Open University Robotics Outreach Group, which led to the Blue Peter/RoboFesta Competition in 2001. This competition - which required children to "Design a Really Useful Robot" - had 32,000 entries. [11]