• Home
• Subjects
• Blog Roll
• Blindside
• Kable
• Advanced Search

• 

Arise Sir Francis: MySociety FoI service

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!

Published by William Heath on 23/02/08 at 6:59pm

Comments

1. Ruth writes to point out she posted about this in 2006. Fair enough.

   (But I had a premonition about it in 2003

   Reply by  on  02/24/08  at  8:22 pm

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

Categories

• "What do we want?"
  • Wibbipedia/MindtheGap
  • Design: Co-creation
    • Online Maps
  • Design: user-oriented
  • Foundation of Trust
    • Identity
    • Data nitwittery
  • Save Time and Money
• Greener government IT
• Pertinent Art
• Power of Information
• Political engagement
• "Transformational Government"
• Government Procurement
• Across the Board
• Ideal Goverment - project

Comment

Anyone is free to comment. Or mail with an article if you want to be an author. I'll post it up and send you a password. This whole thing is supported by Kable.

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics

This page has been viewed 387974 times

Entries: 1523 | Comments: 2374 | Trackbacks: 206
Most Recent Entry: 05/16/2008 10:36 pm
Most Recent Comment: 05/16/2008 11:49 am

Members: 185 | Logged in: 0 | Guests: 28
Most recent visitor: 05/17/2008 02:10 am
Most visitors ever: 443 on 10/12/2005 02:21 pm