Puffbox

Happy birthday to MySociety: five years old, and now talking in terms of 20-year plans. Tom Steinberg's speech at last night's birthday party contains much to ponder. Our agreement on the basics is a given. You can do a tremendous amount of good with relatively little money, as long as you have good people involved. People [...] read on »

Congratulations (hardly for the first time, of course) to the MySociety crew: in less than two months, it looks like their community of volunteers has completed the work to timestamp the 42,019 video clips supplied to They Work For You by BBC Parliament, covering the entire 2007-8 parliamentary session. Hero status is rightly accorded to [...] read on »

It took a couple of days, but the list of winners from this week's New Statesman awards has finally emerged. As predicted, MySociety didn't go home empty-handed, with recognition for their FOI site, What Do They Know? And it's good to see Patient Opinion getting recognition in the Community Activism category - their approach to [...] read on »

LibDem MP Lynne Featherstone has an idea. She tells Liberal Conspiracy the one IT project she'd like to see from government would be (if I can paraphrase) an email-bouncing facility, where you'd send an email (for example) to yourpostcode@police.gov.uk (sic), and it would automatically get forwarded to the relevant coppers. She rightly notes that sites [...] read on »

LibDem MP Jo Swinson raised the subject of parliamentary video clips going on YouTube, during questions to the Leader of the House last week. You can see it below. Helen Goodman's response is enlightening: video material isn't allowed to be hosted on a site where it can be searched or downloaded 'to ensure that it is [...] read on »

Nominations have closed for this, the tenth year of the New Statesman new media awards. So the winners of the five trophies are (theoretically) listed somewhere on this page. You might find a few gems you didn't previously know about, but overall, I instinctively find the list a bit depressing. Most nominees have only received a [...] read on »

Writing on Comment Is Free, Hazel Blears reckons Labour's problem is that it has become distanced from its voters. 'The problem is the powerlessness within the system for the majority of people,' she writes. 'People feel that their views disappear into a black hole, without the slightest echo.' Hazel's solution is 'a healthy dose of direct [...] read on »

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 »

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 »

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 »