Tag: data

Iraq, Clay Shirky, Court Reporting, Post Codes API. My links July 5th through July 10th

These are some of the things I’ve been reading recently:

  • Ernest Marples’ Postcode Latitude/Longitude Lookup API – Post codes are really useful, but the powers that be keep them closed unless you have loads of money to pay for them. Which makes it hard to build useful websites (and that makes Ernest sad). So we are setting them free and using them to run PlanningAlerts.com and Jobcentre Pro Plus. We’re doing the same as everyone’s being doing for years, but just being open about it.
  • PA ‘public service reporting’ pilot set for launch | Media | guardian.co.uk – “The Press Association is to launch a “public service reporting” pilot project later in the year aimed at replacing the dwindling news coverage given to meetings of public bodies in the local and regional press” hen I started in journalism this was core, not a peripheral part of the job.
  • Living with rats – Nobody has heard of Clay Shirky – “Out of around 40 council officers there, four had heard of the Digital Britain report. Three had heard of Charlie Leadbeater, one of the keynote speakers at Monday’s bash. As for Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and every aspiring social media guru’s guru, he drew a blank. (There’s a link to one of his talks here, if you’re interested).”
  • 100 hours this summer – “Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours? Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on. I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.”
  • The Generation M Manifesto – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org – “You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful. There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.” What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.”
  • Will Perrin : An open, digital Iraq inquiry: “The inquiry should assume that interesting things will be done with the information they publish off their website by independents.” A really thorough explanation from Will Perrin about how the UK Government Iraq Enquiry could use the web and meta data in important ways.

Stuff I've seen July 1st through July 4th

These are my links for July 1st through July 4th:

  • It's The Ruddy Future – "Hello people! So glad you've pulled your finger out – and used it to click through to our lovely website. Just by being here, you've already taken your first step towards a super sexy, rewarding career in technology.
    Well done you!"
  • Do you care about Wales? Can you code? Fancy helping TheyWorkForYou then? | Quixotic Quisling – "TheyWorkForYou are looking for volunteer coders interested in working on Welsh Assembly data. If that’s you, please join the new discussion list and let’s figure out how to do it."

    If you don’t know TheyWorkForYou then take some time to familiarise yourself. It’s a well established site taking parliamentary data and presenting it in a queryable form. It’s free, loaded with information and very useful indeed.

  • Directgov | Innovate | – "Welcome to Directgov | innovate. We developed our platform to enable conversation with the developer community around innovative use of digital technologies in the government space."

    We blog and encourage people to submit examples of apps developed in the government space using government data or demonstrating innovative use of technologies.

  • CKAN – Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network – Home –
  • Socrata –
  • About Socialbrite.org | Socialbrite – "an affiliation of passionate social media consultants and strategists who believe in collaborating to produce positive change. Through training workshops, reports, case studies, learning materials, blogging and consulting services, we want to make sure that everyone has access to the knowledge and tools that the social media revolution offers."

Stuff I've seen June 27th through June 30th

These are my links for June 27th through June 30th:

  • Poynter Online – Youtube Launches Citizen reporter Support – The site has just unveiled a new effort to improve and promote videos that are newsworthy: the Reporters' Center. The Reporters' Center launched Monday with about 35 instructional videos from professional journalists on how to handle a range of reporting challenges, including: understanding privacy issues (and staying out of jail), shooting video with your cell phone, fact-checking assertions, conducting a good interview and covering a humanitarian crisis safely.
  • Building Britain’s Future: the next step to better policy discussion online at Helpful Technology – "a fair crack at how we might present big policy documents online. To me, this is one of the big challenges in digital engagement right now: we have a fair number of tool options for consultations, and are getting better at applying the ‘classic’ social media tools of Twitter, YouTube and Flickr – but the practicalities and small-p politics of presenting large documents in anything more than a downloadable PDF are still daunting. Like Digital Britain or New Opportunities, BBF is not (primarily) a consultation, so has to struggle with the thorny question of what to do with feedback and whether to solicit it at all."
  • http://mypolice.wordpress.com/ – MyPolice.org is a web-based service that fosters constructive, collaborative communication between communities and the police forces which serve them. MyPolice originated at (and won!) Social Innovation Camp, June 2009. Sicamp is a challenge to turn back of the envelope ideas which use the web to tackle 'stuff that matters' into a reality. In just 48 hours.
  • Reuters Editors » Blog Archive » Rethinking rights, accreditation, and journalism itself in the age of Twitter | Blogs | – Reuters understands hat social media can also be journalism: "To a 23 year-old athlete, used to putting out a “news feed” of every detail of her personal life and training on various social media platforms, there simply isn’t a distinction. Her life IS a news feed. Her blog IS a publishing platform. Her Facebook page IS the daily newspaper of her life."
  • The Conservative Party | News | Speeches | David Cameron: Giving power back to the people – "Information is power – because information allows people to hold the powerful to account. This has never been more true than today, in the information age. The internet is an amazing pollinator, spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. It turns lonely fights into mass campaigns; transforms moans into movements; excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action. And constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful.

Why it's great that Tim Berners-Lee is advising the British Government.

The announcement that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be advising the UK Government is important not because he invented the world wide web, it’s not even because he’s very clever, and so credible he’s hard to ignore.

It’s simple because he’s really is obsessed with data. I know that seems like statement of the bleedin’ obvious but its worth saying.  This is good news because he really does know what he’s talking about. If you want to appreciate how much he cares, watch this TED.com talk from February 2009:


In it he talks about his concept of Linked Data, which asks for 3 things:

  1. Individual bits of data should also be given web addresses, that’s an address beginning with http for every bit of data within another document: people, places, events, products, genes, chemicals etc etc.
  2. That data appears in some sort of useful protocol.
  3. When we get the information it also contains relationships –  and whenever it expresses a relationship, the thing it relates too also has an address starting with http.

So Tim Berners-Lee cares about much more than the mechanics of how we move to HTML 5 (the new rules for how we will work the www).  He cares about how data can make government more transparent and help knowledge evolve faster.  His role will include (hat tip to Tom Scott):

  1. overseeing the creation of a single online point of access and work with departments to make this part of their routine operations.
  2. helping to select and implement common standards for the release of public data
  3. developing Crown Copyright and ‘Crown Commons’ licenses and extending these to the wider public sector
  4. driving the use of the internet to improve consultation processes.
  5. working with the Government to engage with the leading experts internationally working on public data and standards

He also believes in the power of grassroots movements. That’s Us.  As he puts it in the talk:

I asked people to put their documents on this web thing, and you did!  Thanks.  It’s been a blast.

He understands that the remarkable thing about the internet is we built it.  It flourishes because we choose to share stuff with each other using the rules he created back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

So a world wide web of Linked Data is not something he expects big commerce or big government to take sole responsibility for. He expects us to learn how to do it, just as every time we add something to Facebook we show that we have learnt how to play our part in making the World Wide Web.

You might also want to listen to this interview with Rory Cellan-Jones, about the problems of bureacracy. Emma Mulqueeny thinks his reputation will bring much needed “serious intervention” to a data muddle, while Paul Canning echoes that, hoping that (with the departure of Tom Watson from the Cabinet Office) Sir Tim might be able to act as a data head-banger.