- NewBizNews: Hyperlocal « BuzzMachine – The value of volunteering: This is the hardest to calculate but is critical to the local models: People are contributing to the newssphere because they want to, because they care. With help, I’m confident they’ll do more. That’s part of what we’re trying to discover at CUNY in our work with The Local at the New York Times: how communities can be supported to report on themselves. This could be podcasting a school-board meeting or crowdsourcing projects or looking up records. This, like new ad models, will be the subject of some speculative brainstorming. And it will be difficult to put numbers to it. But it’s critical.
- Mediabox – New strand Mini Mediabox – with grants from £1,500 – £5,000 is now open. Mini Mediabox is for grassroots and community organisations with an annual turnover of £100k or under, designed to enable smaller organisations to access funding for their youth-led projects.
- Home | Nominet Trust – We aim to support distinctive and inventive Internet-related projects that can make a difference to people, primarily in the areas of education, online safety and inclusion. With our grants we back programmes and organisations using IT to benefit society. The Nominet Trust is a charity created by Nominet, which maintains the .uk register of domain names and is one of the world’s largest Internet registries.
- The Straight Choice | The election leaflet project – Election leaflets are one of the main weapons in the fight for votes in the UK. They are targeted, effective and sometimes very bitter. We need your help to photograph and map them so we can keep an eye on what the parties are up to, and try to keep them honest.
- Murdoch: Web sites to charge for content – CNN.com – “I suspect within any readership there is a small slice — maybe three percent — that is willing to pay. News organizations are going to have to find a way of getting money from that slice without driving away everybody else,”
Year: 2009
Data, crown copyright, archives, listening to communities and the "empowerment heist".
I’m rootling through my feed reader catching up.
On Thursday Tom Watson announced that Crown Copyright was to be revised so those wanting to data mash with information from the Office of Public Sector Information will now be automatically granted a license. With a rather neat turn of phrase “They say information is power, but only distributed information is truly empowering” he went on to say:
the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) has looked again at the restrictions of Crown Copyright, and now a licence will automatically be granted to anyone wanting to use the information rather than having to apply beforehand. OPSI has also shown how Government can publish in a ‘web-friendly’ way rather than just as PDFs, and I want to see this approach rolled out across Government. Today I’m pleased to announce that COI is launching new standards on quality to make Government sites as effective and easy to use as possible.”
The COI site on web site clarity was first mention on the Power of Information Blog and is http://usability.coi.gov.uk/
The Guardian has been continuing it’s Free Our Data reporting, with Charles Arthur a little underwhelmed by the announcements above:
Umm. It’s not quite the revolution that some of us were hoping for. It doesn’t even yet seem to legitimise the re-use and repurposing by sites such as theyworkforyou.com of the contents of Hansard – which is Crown copyright. That’s the trouble with tectonic shifts, though. Nothing seems to happen for a very long time, and then sometimes it happens all at once.
I don’t agree, (and neither does Tim Davies) the shift won’t be seismic in the sense of some sort of overnight social media sensation. The last 5 years has seen steady change and the groundwork is still going on at government level. The COI’s social media guidance document (a pdf – tut) says civil servants should:
Help non-governmental bodies to build new services by structuring information so that they can combine public data with private data. Avoid replicating what is already being undertaken by non-governmental bodies.
Wednesday saw the launch of a 12 week consultation called Archives for the 21st Century, again data, how we capture and share it will be at the heart of this. The press information mentions one wonderful example of a data set created from digitising the log books of ships going back to the 17th century. Hour after hour mariners from Britain, Holland, France and Spain would log the time, their position and the weather. The CLIWOC project is now a database for Climate Change Study. Another example they use is Birmingham Stories.
Also on Wednesday Downing Street restored the e-mail the Prime Minister service and Hazel Blears announced that one way for councils to save £600 million a year was by listening to their communities. This riled Julian Dobson who called it an “empowerment heist”:
‘Involving communities are key to unlocking greater savings – when it comes to finding efficiencies, empowering local people is part of the solution, not part of the problem,’ she said.
There is of course some truth in this – councils that listen to local people and provide services that are valued will achieve more for their money. But the crude equation of ’empowerment’ with savings is dangerous nonsense: there’s no rationale for turning what may be a fortunate by-product in some circumstances into the raison d’etre. Yesterday’s speech might have been excusable were it not for the ten years of rhetoric that had preceded it.
Ofqual’s new Chief Officers report has been made comment-able and Spaghettitesting listed the Government winners of the Webby’s including a non-governmental site from the transparency movement GovernmentDocs.org.
thestraightchoice.org – The Election Leaflet Monitoring Project
The Straight Choice website is a place where anyone can upload any election leaflet delivered to them, so we can all keep track of what the parties are saying and whether it is true:
Election leaflets are one of the main weapons in the fight for votes in the UK. They are targeted, effective and sometimes very bitter. We need your help to photograph and map them so we can keep an eye on what the parties are up to, and try to keep them honest.
It has been put together by 3 very fine people: Julian Todd who wrote Public Whip with Francis Irving, which became the input for mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com. In 2007 he made undemocracy.com which applied the same idea to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council. Richard Pope was also behind the Planning Alerts project, Groups Near You and StreetWire. He has a track record on this sort of site from the 2005 Election Memory project to record and publicise manifestos of the different parties in the Lambeth local elections. Francis Irving has also done substantial work on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Great Job.
Stuff I've seen from May 2nd to May 6th
These are my links for May 2nd through May 6th:
- twittl | Twittl – Chat Catcher is a simple script that you can install on your website or WordPress blog and it will pull in all conversations related to your blog post from Twitter, Friendfeed, and Identi.ca. These conversations get posted as comments/trackbacks on your blog post. http://tr.im/kCji
- Working Together – Public Services on your side. – Working Together – Public Services On Your Side details the steps the Government is taking to give people, communities and frontline staff the information and real power they need to personalise public services. Reflecting their local and individual needs will create a richer, fairer and safer society.
- Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”
- Pixelpipe – Free your content, post, upload and share anywhere – Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text and upload photos, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 75 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and other online destinations. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their media and sharing their life.