Videoing council meetings revisited: the limits of openness in a transparent...
A couple of months ago, I blogged about the ridiculous situation of a local councillor being hauled up in front of the council’s standards committee for posting a council webcast onto YouTube, and...
View ArticleWhat’s that coming over the hill, is it… the Public Data Corporation?
A couple of days ago, there was a brief announcement from the UK Government of plans for a new Public Data Corporation, which would “bring together Government bodies and data into one organisation”. A...
View ArticleGeorge Osborne’s open data moment: it’s the Treasury, hell yeah
As a bit of an outsider, reading the government’s pronouncements on open data feels rather like reading official Kremlin statements during the Cold War. Sometimes it’s not what they’re saying, it’s...
View ArticleWhen Washington DC took a step back from open data & transparency
When the amazing Emer Coleman first approached me a year and a half to get feedback on the plans for the London datastore, I told her that the gold standard for such datastores was that run by the...
View ArticleOpen Data: A threat or saviour for democracy?
This is my presentation to the superb OKCON2011 conference in Berlin last week. It’s obviously openly licensed (CC-BY), so feel free to distribute widely. Comments also welcome. Tagged: democracy,...
View ArticleThe Public Data Corporation vs Good Governance
As I feared back when it was first announced, the proposed UK Public Data Corporation has got nothing to do with open data, and everything to do with protecting the interests of a few civil servants,...
View ArticleThe economics of open data & the big society
Yesterday I received an email from a Cabinet Office civil servant in preparation for a workshop tomorrow about the Open Data in Growth Review, and in it I was asked to provide: an estimation of the...
View ArticleAn open letter to Vince Cable
Dear Mr Cable I read with interest yesterday your letter to the Prime Minister about some of the issues facing the UK in the future, and in particular the need for a vision and for a connected approach...
View ArticlePlanning Alerts: first fruits
Well, that took a little longer than planned… [I won't go into the details, but suffice to say our internal deadline got squeezed between the combination of a fast-growing website, the usual issues of...
View ArticleHow to help build the UK’s open planning database: writing scrapers
This post is by Andrew Speakman, who’s coordinating OpenlyLocal’s planning application work. As Chris wrote in his last post announcing OpenlyLocal’s progress in building an open database of planning...
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