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Posts under ‘Transparency’
If you watch one video this week, make it this one
Further to my previous post on why visualisation of data matters – and what the potential abuses are in the hands of pressure groups. I’ve just seen this video by an American pollster and data visualiser @alexlundry – he covers the deceptive use of visualisations and the way that lobbies use them. He covers the reasons [...]
More data for you
Another day, another step in the right direction. Boris Johnson is opening up around 200 datasets about London along with an offer of from Channel 4′s 4iP fund of up to £200,000 to help developers to create innovative applications that use it. Why is this exciting to anyone with an interest in local democracy? Well, [...]
Transparency for lobbyists
Like a minority of people who have watched what will surely be 2009′s official leitmotif – the demand for full disclosure from MPs – play out, I’ve wondered when similar demands will be applied to those who rival MPs for power. This phrase of Larry Elliot’s – explaining the roots of the current economic crisis [...]
Against transparency?
Here’s Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University questioning the benefits of government transparency: “There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is [...]
Handling Freedom of Information requests
Apparently 13.1% of FoI requests to ‘Departments of State’ are now made through MySociety’s ‘What do they know?’ website. How on earth did they find out such a statistic I wonder? Meanwhile, as it’s Friday, it’s time to enjoy how FoI requests are, occasionally, handled in the US. From the Martin Rosenbaum on the BBC [...]
An idea
Following the Daily Mail’s crusade against council employees using Facebook, Sunny, here, (in the comments) thinks it’s time for everyone to write to their local authority to find out how long council employees are spending on the Daily Mail website. This is what FoI requests are for, isn’t it?
Transparency: The arms race hots up
E-mail has transformed the way that senior politicians behave. Fifteen years ago, almost all conversations between politicians, lobbyists, civil servants and everyone else were either verbal or on paper. Technology has made recording easier. Written communications are infinitely more index/searchable. It would be an understatement to say that the situation has been transformed as a [...]
To the barricades!
The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator. Because [...]
Social data unchained
If you haven’t seen Socrata yet, it’s really worth a look – it illustrates the quality of data that could be made available to us in the UK. It shows that – once we get beyond the classic journalistic question of “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – once the data is in [...]
