Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - transparency

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.

A few paragraphs

2010-07-26T10:33:00+01:00

There are a number of potential topics for blog posts swirling in my brain which I'm not going to have time to write. I shall therefor attempt to address each on in paragraph form (Twitter style is a little too brief for me).

We were at Maelstrom this weekend. We splashed out for a van so we could take our proper IC tent to the event which we also slept in. Although our normal sleeping tent is quite spacious the IC tent is a lot more so and benefits from not broiling you in your sleeping bag when the sun rises.

I tried Google's Navigation mode on my software pimped up Hero. I can see why the shares in TomTom and Garmin shares fell so sharply on it's announcement. I particularly liked the street view picture that's presented at the end of the journey for extra confirmation. I predict the era of the dedicated GPS road navigation unit is coming to an end - to be replaced by multi-functional smart phone type data pads.

I awoke this morning to the latest Wikileaks data dump as reported by the Guardian. I can understand why the armed forces are upset about this but it's really an OpSec fail on their part that someone can extract that much data from their systems. Going after Wikileaks will ultimately be a futile exercise. Also baring a live twitter feed of current manoeuvres I'm not sure there should be an expectation of secrecy for historical military data. Transparency is coming to government which I think is a good thing, why not the military? At the same time we need to take some steps to educate the public on the limits of data. If people consider an entry in a database as equating to actual truth on the ground they are going to find themselves disappointed.

We watched the latest Grand Moff/Gatiss collaboration on TV last night. Although the final third had us shouting at the TV for the slowness of the protagonists to put two and two together overall we liked it. The text overlays were fun and the writing has done a good job of bringing the characters forward into the 21st century. We shall be watching the rest of the series.

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.