Author: Nick Booth

4th August 2011

Creative Councils, Podnosh and a partnership in Brighton.

I’m delighted to say the the Brighton and Hove Council proposal to the Nesta Creative Councils challenge has made it to the final 17 long list of 137 applications.

Why so? Well Podnosh is one of the partner organisations in the Brighton bid along with Demsoc and Public-i.

Creative councils:

ambition over the next two years is to work with a small group of pioneering local authorities across England and Wales and their partners to develop, implement and spread transformational new approaches to meeting some of the biggest medium and long-term challenges facing communities and local services.

Put simply our proposal will work on taking online and offline civic conversation and digitally connecting that into local public service decision making in a concrete way.

Thanks very much to Anthony Zacharzewski, Catherine Howe and Paul Brewer for getting things to this stage.

What next? More work will be done on the final 17, with the hope of much more significant investment in 5 of the ideas.

The other 16 on the long list are:

Bristol
Cambridgeshire
Cornwall
Derbyshire
Essex
London Borough of Havering
London Borough of Islington
Leicester
Monmouthshire
Reading
Rossendale
Rotherham
Stoke on Trent
Westminster
Wigan
York

You can find and engage will all 137 ideas on simpl.

1st August 2011

Open data, corporations, companies charities and some remarkable progress

Chris Taggart is one of the main energy bundles behind real practical progress in open data in the UK. besides starting to scrape local government websites to create the the remarkable openlylocal, and then casually setting up open charities (open data for information about charities) he has also been working on making information about business more freely available,

Open Corporates – he tells me – has reached quite a milestone:

A few hours ago, OpenCorporates tipped over the 20 million companies mark (with information on 40 million statutory filings too). Traffic is doubling roughly every 3 months, and all without VC backing.

We’re pretty pleased with all this, and couldn’t have done this without the open data community, who’ve helped with writing scrapers, giving advice and generally being there for us.

Open Corporates not only makes it easy for us to find out who owns what and how much profit they make, it allows us to groups companies, so we can see relationships begin to emerge. So for example you can help list the companies that form part of the Birmingham City Football club family of companies.

Why am I telling you this? Because it is important for us to recognise that individuals or groups of independent minded people are making significant progress is making our public life more Transparent. they are no longer alone – they are starting to see some government help, in the UK, USA and the EU and charitable trusts are also growing their interest in how open data bolsters democracy.

But just for today I’d like to say congrats on 20 million companies – that’s is some achievement.