puffbox

Stop what you’re doing and sign up

I’m not sure I need to waste my time explaining why you need to go to TheyWorkForYou and sign up to MySociety’s campaign to Free Our Bills - or rather, to have Parliamentary data marked up in mashup-friendly XML. Just compare ‘proper’ Hansard to TheyWorkForYou, and imagine the same process being done on all Parliamentary [...] read on »

Set the Census data free

One particularly difficult phase of my career was my time with National Statistics, in the aftermath of the 2001 Census. I tried, and ultimately failed, to persuade the organisation to recognise the tremendous asset they held in Census data, and to make wide public access a priority. I’m proud of some of the (relatively modest) [...] read on »

‘Gov 2.0′ in US presidential campaigning

I’m grateful to Jeff Jarvis for a detailed post on ‘government 2.0′ (although it isn’t a term he used, nor should he have). He points to two recent proposals from the Democrat candidates for the US presidency. I hadn’t heard Hillary Clinton’s suggestion, back in January, that government should actually be required to blog: I want to [...] read on »

Cameron calls for data standards

Of all the topics I might have expected David Cameron to speak in favour of, standardised data formats was not top of the list. So I’m grateful to Nick Booth for pointing to Cameron’s speech last Friday to the Conservative Councillors’ Association. At the moment, local government bodies must provide the public with information about the [...] read on »