Thanks again for all of the feedback on those open data posts recently. Just to recap, I’m helping to organise an open data project for some school pupils within the a London borough in the new year. One of the big tasks is to flush out all of the data that may be available. I’m [...]
Posts under ‘Transparency’
Finding all of the interesting data within one local authority area
A while ago, I posted here giving reasons why I thought it would be a good idea to start involving school pupils in the processing of public data. There are strong democratic arguments for doing this – ones that aren’t immediately obvious. There are also good ‘transparency’ arguments (but I’d make my usual point here [...]
Douglas Rushkoff on transparency
It’s late on Friday afternoon – here’s some brain-candy to chew on over the weekend. Here’s Douglas Rushkoff – one of the most established commentators on interactive communcations explaining the cost of transparency. It’s liberating stuff – yet a lot of it seems so straightforward in Rushkoff’s hands. It often reads like the bleedin’ obvious. [...]
Local Gov Camp session on what data visualisation is for
I spent Saturday at Local Government Camp in Birmingham – there’ll be at least one post along here shortly based on things I learned there. But this one is here to host the slides I used at the start of the conversation (sorry – Slideshare is being a complete pain today and I can’t embed [...]
Towards a local authority-wide schools data-hack project
It’s a regular theme of this blog that transparency and open data – while undoubtedly being good things – can often create situations in which democracy is diminished rather than enhanced. The other day, for example, I posted my misgivings about guerilla webcasting of council meetings. (Shorter version: can result in selective reporting, poorer press [...]
Council meetings – blogging and web-casting
The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer. My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some [...]
Business people into politics = corruption. Politicians into business = clean?
There was an interesting review of a study around politically connected firms on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed programme recently asking how far different countries find their governance effected by the relationships politicians have with previous (or current!) employers. The early coalition-casualty, David Laws – for example – is a former Vice President of JP Morgan [...]
Positive Political Blogging: Distributed Intelligence vs. interest groups and think tanks
Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved [...]
JFDI: tactics, transparency and interactivity
Dave Briggs has a good post up about how organisations introduce technology. He contrasts the ‘JFDI’ approach (which stands for Just Do It) and a more boring sustainable approach. I’ve met Dave and he has very sensible views on Football. Our mutual friend Brian Clough could have contributed to this whole discussion. As he put [...]
Expertise
Peter Levine says… “Although I acknowledge the value of expertise, we can identify several important general reasons why it is never enough and we always need citizens’ participation to tackle social problems.” What follows is a list of three reasons why experts shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions on their own. It’s one of the [...]
