Comments on: The Power of Information: let’s get to it

By: Ideal Gov administrator

Ideal Gov administrator — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:30:07 +0000

Just noticed that ‘fess-up. How very honourable of you Sir!

By: alex

alex — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:21:28 +0000

I owe my tenner

Better send it to double d

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:40:03 +0000

William’s brief appearance this week at another meeting similarly subject to the rule took him into the citizen-centric area, and its a pity that he had to bow out for personal reasons. Those of us at that meeting are still puzzled about how to formulate our message, and have not started to think about how to add personal tags to data feeds of our own creation. Happy to give the data raw, but if I think someone else’s data is wrong I need to be sure that who sent it is securely attached to it.

By: Citizen Dave

Citizen Dave — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:12:29 +0000

The BBC idea is a good, but I’m afraid our democratic voices cut little ice with aristocrats of the BBC. I’m all in favour of firing Jonathan Ross and using the money to create an RSS feed of government data, but it will never happen. You say ‘We may need to sort out the API but the core message is: “Give us the data raw, and give it to us now.”’ But they don’t want to give you the data at all, raw or cooked.

Of course, in a proper, accountable democracy I would give the government access to my VRM feeds in return for access to their data feeds, quid pro quo.

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:06:28 +0000

It’s good to know that at least the constructive use of the on-line world and of government owned data in that world is being discussed.

“Give us the data raw, and give it to us now.” When it comes to say OS map data this might be true. But I think it misses the observation that much data held by gov often isn’t released on-line for “DPA reasons” – when in fact most people don’t want data at the personal level, they want localised aggregated anonymised data – local monthly crime stats for example. Unfortunately many gov dept seem too ready to put this type of data analysis into the “to hard to do camp”, when the reality is that with a little ingenuity its perfectly and cheaply doable, and would empower many gov employees to release data into the on-line world in a much more timely and usable manner than some dry yearly ONS report compiled at great expense. May be the new UK Statistics Authority is the organisation to lead on this type of Information Initiative….

By: Jeremy Gould

Jeremy Gould — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:53:12 +0000

Aw, come on. Who was there?

You’ll be accusing government of being secretive next 🙂

By: alex

alex — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:15:10 +0000

Someone in Whitehall has been sitting on the bloggers code since civil serf story burst.

A tenner says it is not out by summer recess because of ongoing ” operational reasons ” a la Ryanair

I and lots of others don’t get much public value from the bbc licence fee. We do get lots of crowding out of talent.

Lots of people don’t pay it because they don’t get any reception. It is going the way of fixed lines.