Category: Government

New report counts cuts to spending in the UK voluntary and community sector

Counting the Cuts: The impact of spending cuts on the UK voluntary and community sector is a new report published today by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO).

Following a collaborative project to map stories of voluntary groups told their funding will be reduced – and analysing the government’s projected spending plans for the Spending Review period 2011–2015) – NCVO estimate “the voluntary and community sector is facing nearly £3billion in cuts over the next five years.”

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Open data, corporations, companies charities and some remarkable progress

Open Corporates - open data for making companies and corporates more transparent

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.

BBC Coventry and warwickshire, public sector, hyperlocal and social media – an evening.

Monday evening was a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours with a broad range of folk from the public sector, BBC and blogging communities in Coventry and Warwickshire.

We brought them together as part of the work we have been doing with the BBC to encourage stronger links and better understanding between mainstream news and hyperlocal blogging.  The BBC team n Coventry was keen to reach out to a broad range of people in their patch with an interest in social media.

a group of people sitting at a table talking

It was run as a very simple unconference – Read more