Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - government

Data Tsunami

2010-11-19T11:39:00+00:00

The government has done another public spending data dump today. It's one of the policies that I was really in favour of before the election and it's good to see the coalition holding to it's word with this release. The raw data is available from the Cabinet Office and should soon appear on the government's data portal data.gov.uk. Reports of what is being done with the data is being followed by people like the Guardian Free our Data bloggers. Expect people like the Open Knowledge people to come up with some fancy visualisations of the data at Where Does My Money Go.

I'm sure there will be a number of stories about individual line items that get queried, something ministers want to happen. I'm hoping people will in general take a more holistic view of what's being provided. It won't benefit anyone if we tie up banks of expensive civil servants answering FOI requests to justify and contextualise individual items in the data set. However I'm hoping there will be some serious analysis on the trends of spending as well as leaving people more informed of what government actually does.

Personally I'm looking forward to next year when all contracts over 25,000 will be published. That should really make for some interesting reading.

Digital Democracy

2010-07-01T10:22:00+01:00

Our new Coalition Overlords^tm have launched a new web-site to solicit feedback from the citizenry on what laws should be repealed/modified. This is a little more involved than the current option to sign e-Petitions at the number 10 website. The site supports commenting, tagging as well subscribing to feeds for each idea. I'm quite impressed if this site has come from zero to production since the new government took power.

Of course experience with the e-Petition site has shown governments are quite capable of ignoring causes with popular support. There are also issue of selection bias, astro-turfing and inclusion of people without broadband connections. However it's an interesting experiment and we'll see where it goes.

Openness and Transparency

2010-06-03T12:41:00+01:00

One of the things that I found encouraging about the Tory manifesto was they seemed to get the concept of government transparency and open data. While news about top civil service pay is what hit the headlines yesterday the new directive to civil servants is much wider. While the last government should be saluted for bringing the country the Freedom of Information Act this directive goes much further. The intention is to create the presumption that all government information should be proactively made available rather than released on demand.

From my point of view the two biggest items are a publishing of all central government IT contracts and access to the spending databases (at various levels of granularity depending on level of government). I expect the next few months will have all sorts of stories about excessive or hard to justify spending by various departments in the civil service. This is a good thing and hopefully the net result will be better, more accountable government.

The mechanics of delivery for all this information is going to be overseen by a new Public Sector Transparency Board which has Tom Steinberg (of MySociety fame) amongst it's members so I'm pretty hopeful this data won't end up in hard to parse and analyse proprietary formats. It will be interesting to see what sorts of uses all this information can used for.