There’s been quite enough sensible earnest commentary on how Data.gov.uk will transform policy and help us all join in describing problems.

Here’s the Daily Mash’s alternative take. (via @stevemoore4good)

Here’s James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine:

“Some of Britain’s most impressive internet policy experts had long been trying to break down this particular door. Ex-MP Richard Allan. Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson. Internet gurus Tom Steinberg, and Tom Loosemore. Former Number 10 policy advisor William Perrin. All bounced back dazed when they tried shoulder charging the Ordnance Survey’s door, as if tripped up by a canny geographer’s sandal on their run up. So my colleague Tom Chatfield and I decided we that needed to find out exactly how the man who invented the web had managed to reinvent the rules of British data.”

Via Tom Watson MP.

No time to post much here today apart from to point to the new UK government data website – www.data.gov.uk – as described here. There are plenty of data sets that allow you to browse geographical data and find out different information about local schools and other services.

There’s also a good section in which Sir Tim Berners-Lee explains what the semantic web is in fairly straightforward terms.

View it here, by all means, but do visit the site as well if you can?

For me, the most exciting bit is that it allows people to see things in new ways and conceptualise problems differently. Poor policy-making costs us a fortune and results in missed opportunities. I’m not sure that Brian Hoadley fully gets this when he says:

“I’ve been waiting for Joe Bloggs on the street to mention in passing – “Hey, just yesterday I did ‘x’ online” and have it be one of those new ‘Services’ that has been developed from the release of our data. (Note: A Joe Bloggs who is not related to Government or those who encircle Government. A real true independent Citizen.)

It may be a long wait.”

Meantimes, here’s Stuart on Lichfield’s data and what it adds to the knowledge of local authorities about their own area, as well as our knowledge about our local authorities.

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 why this is a much more powerful way of presenting information.

He also covers …. oh, just watch the whole thing. It’s only a coupla minutes and it’s very good.

(via Tom, Tom and Russell).

I draw one hefty conclusion from it. We need to find a way to increase public awareness of how this data can be abused, manipulated and misrepresented using the devices that Alex has outlined here. This is an important bit of civil literacy that could counteract many of the threats that I outlined in my previous post here.

Perhaps a Tumblr-type website where any mashups that anyone sees are submitted, then people who know about it (or are prepared to read a few of the books in this presentation) give the mashup points based upon the provenance and honesty of the data and it’s use?

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, it allows a large number of people to take existing technologies, adapt them slightly, pour the newly-available information into them and then present them to anyone who is interested. It creates fantastic new research possibilities, and allows developers to visualise the data in a way that may tell us something that we didn’t know already.

Continuing my theme from the other day, this is another way of crowdsourcing intelligence and judgement rather than expressed opinion.I suppose it’s worth putting all of this into the rubric that most of the bloggers on this blog use to define what is good and what is bad though. Creative use of policy-related visualisations are definitely a good thing. Anything that makes it easier for more people to participate in deliberative processes is, again, a good thing – especially if it involves getting lots of people involved in the design of services. Datasets + visualisations should help there.

My one concern would be the ‘arms race’ one. At the moment, government – representing (in theory) the interests of the nation as a whole, has one strong suit in it’s ongoing battle with sectional interests. It has access to large amounts of information and it has a large apparatus of civil servants, think tanks, academics and local politicians that it can use to organise, express and apply that data.

Government enjoys monopoly privileges. From a democratic point of view, this looks quite bad. The flipside of the question is this: If you make data that government previously monopolised open to the public, will it be used by a wide well-meaning group of civic minded individuals? Or is a body of people with a mandate to promote the interests of the nation as a whole handing one of it’s most valuable weapons to a well-financed group of vested interests? The question of institutional capture.

It’s certainly the case in the US that commercial lobbies have been able to supersede governmental bodies as the representatives of the US abroad. As just one example, it was widely acknowledged that the US position at WIPO in the mid 1990s was represented by commercial lobbies within the motion picture and music industries – and not bodies that were being managed from within government.

Like I say, on balance, this is a good thing. But we should be aware of the dangers.

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 the public domain – that this information can be used to model the big questions of our time – turned into interfaces that allow us to explore and model problems.

Take the data, add crowdsourced intelligence, and you may end up with a much better description of the problems that policymakers face.

It also shows why the Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data‘ campaign is so important.