Author: Nick Booth

Stuff I've seen April 24th through April 25th

These are my links for April 24th through April 25th:

  • gSO Talk: Where did gStepOne come from? – Data: Facts out of context. eg, it will be 30 deg C today, or the train arrives in 5 minutes. (Data is thus of minimal value.)
    Information: Data organised in a way that has a potential for meaning. eg weather details recorded and organised by date, or a train timetable. (Information has potential value.)
    Knowledge: Data or information that enables the receiver to produce an outcome of value. eg knowing the weather to expect, I can plan a picnic, knowing when a train departs and arrives, I can catch the right one. (Knowledge has high value).

Don't tell the COI but every government news stream now has it's own twitter account.

Some of you will have mixed feelings about this but every major news feed out of the UK government now has it’s own twitter account. What’s interesting about this is the whole process is unofficial.  I’ve no doubt Tom Watson will be delighted, but what will the COI make of this unofficial use of information?  -They’re already working on improving websites, hopefully they will understand this as an improvement in their web presence.

I’m going to quote Geof Cole, who has done this deed:

The Central Office of Information run a rather good website called the News Distribution Service, formerly the Government News Network. Below the fold are the RSS and Twitter feeds in three groups – aggregate, departmental and regional.

Unfortunately, no-one knows about it as the COI doesn’t do much to promote it despite being “the Government’s centre of excellence for marketing and communications”. It consists of news updates for all the big bits of government – departments, agencies and regions – that you could want. It’s a good way of keeping an eye on what they’re all up to an finding the occasional hidden gem of a press release. They’ve had RSS feeds for ages and now they’re on Twitter (thanks to yours truly).

I do hope someone in government picks up the admin for this. If you want to see a full list of the feeds, including your regional one, then here’s a link to Geoff’s blog.

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Update, others on this:

Neil Williams: “It’s likely there will be lots of crossover between Dave’s NDS-fuelled feeds and these civil servant powered accounts, so choose wisely which to follow. The human-edited tweets will offer more than just press releases but they might also be selective about the news they deem tweet-worthy.”

Stuff I've seen April 22nd through April 23rd

These are my links for April 22nd through April 23rd:

  • OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles : Tim’s Blog – “The big challenges are not about technology – they are about the content and the process of mobilisation and communication. When it comes to technology we’ve not got one big challenge we’ve got 100s of small challenges – and we’ve got no systematic way of dealing with them.”
  • Sutton Green Map – “This is the Sutton Green Map, designed for pedestrians and cyclists with lots of overlay information to help you make the most of the Borough.” Brilliant use of open source mapping and data scraping.
  • Echoes From The Edge | Friction arts – Exhibition starts April 23rd 2009: Echoes From The Edge is a unique living history contemporary art exhibition, housed in a converted factory in Digbeth, Birmingham. Over the past eighteen months, Friction Arts have been collaborating with US artist, Shannon Flattery, to create an interactive exhibition reflecting the voices, thoughts and histories of the residents and workers of Digbeth, Deritend and Highgate as the area undergoes it’s most significant changes for forty years.
  • Stumbling and Mumbling: Waste & decentralization – “cutting waste and empowering public sector workers are not substitutes. They go together.”
  • Home of the Community Broadband Network – “There is an increasingly important role for community broadband projects even after traditional operators have provided vanilla services into an area. Many member projects give something back to their local community, and are constantly innovating and evolving their service to the needs of their community.”