WRITTEN ON February 23rd, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Power of Information, Save Time and Money, What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

Oh wow. Oh wow. Every bit as exciting – and this is saying something – as the Viva Obama Mariachi is the long-awaited first public sighting of the MySociety FoI service. So what does it do?

It makes it easy to make FoI requests.

It lists central and local government FoI officers, and you can update the list.

It shares the meandering correspondence and the results obtained under FoI (such as a full listing of all the one-man protests outside Parliament). I hope this avoids the absurd “yes I gave it to you but it’s still crown copyright so if you put it on your website we’ll sue you” insulting waste of taxpayers’ money.

If we all use it, gradually we’ll accumulate an open resource of government data using unfussy contempory web design, managed by people we trust because they perform and don’t have a control-phreak or commercial agenda.

My suggestion is we ask if Cabinet Office wouldn’t mind pointing the now unused domain name “open.gov.uk” at the new MySociety site. Because that says exactly what it does – beautifully designed, no editorial, no nonsense, no absurd Ts&Cs and at no cost to the taxpayer. The site is dedicated to the late Chris Lightfoot, who died almost exactly a year ago.

It’s ethnography in action, it’s open, it’s legal and respectful. It’s efficient (because it’s free and becase each request needs only be made once). It’s transparent, democratic and helps build the foundation of trust (on open source Rails, as it happens). So far there’s only one user – Julian Todd. Let us make it tens of thousands. The potential is immense.

Francis: you’re a legend. Go MySoc!