These are my links for June 19th through August 4th:

• NHS spends millions on websites that fail patients, says government report | Society | The Guardian – Here, here… ” A layer of NHS bureaucracy, represented by websites built by primary care trusts, foundation trusts and strategic health authorities, received “almost no recognition” from the public. “The question is raised why these sites were developed in the first instance,” the report says.”
• O2 makes text donations free for charities – Civil Society – IT – News – providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits – O2 has become the second mobile operator to pledge to deliver 100 per cent of all text donation value to charities in a move which could signal an industry-wide shift.
• Birmingham Post – Business – Business Comment – Business Columnists – Jerry Blackett: Science festival brings hope – The New Optimists asks the simple question: what are you optimistic about? The essays in response – many from academics working in the region’s universities – are exciting and exhilarating
• rebootbritain – Obstacles and their solutions – “….there is insufficient clarity about the cost of failure of the other ways of doing things. Hence innovation feels disproportionately risky and expensive.”
• A Surge of Open Data « Warwickshire Open Data – In the run-up to the last week of the competition we have some great new datasets to play with.
• Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Dig the new breed, Part II – open archaeology and ethics – “…archaeologists, for right or wrong, consider the implications of placing fine grained data in the public domain and “Ethical considerations” have been identified as a “barrier” to deposition. However, there appears to be limited guidance as to how to resolve these issues. This means that many archaeologists are re-inventing the wheel. The challenge is to provide some supporting “thing” that makes it easy for individuals and organisations to get to a clear, and hopefully unambiguous, ethical position. Such a “thing” will reduce uncertainty thereby removing one of the barriers to data sharing. The current default position is the equivalent of doing nothing: surely this must change.”
• Armchair Auditor – “Sometimes you want a high-level view of how much money is being spent by each council service or paid to each supplier. Other times you want to examine the details right down to individual payments.”Armchair Auditor lets you do both.