It’s been a busy fortnight for open-information projects and campaigns. Widely announced and re-announced were the winners of the Show Us A Better Way (SUABW) competition, sponsored by the Government, which sought new solutions to perhaps unknown problems. SUABW asked people what web-based tools they would build from public data-sources that would  improve the way public information is shared and presented.

The winners are:

• Can I Recycle It?
• UK Cycling
• Catchment Areas
• Location of Postboxes
• Loofinder

The BBC PM report referred to a court case being thrown out because a piece of law that the case was built on had been taken off the statute book. The codified law of the British Isles is a huge chunk of public data I’d like to see freed up, so I’m hoping for great things from the Free Our Bills campaign: wide open and accessible Parliamentary Bills… searchable and remixable legislation… a wiki statue book?

Sarah Teather wrote back to me this week concerning EDM2141, saying

The Liberal Democrats believe that Bills ought to be published in such a fashion that they can be accessed as easily and as early as possible by the public.

Sarah will be adding her signature to the EDM which currently has 76 members of Parliament supporting it.

The website of my neighbourhood’s residents association, North West Two, is now up and running. Do drop by and visit them at www.northwesttwo.co.uk

Take a moment to register and then you can post comments on the news and information posted to the site. There will also be two mailing lists for the community, one distributing information from the association and a second one of local freecycle, skill swap and other announcements.

www.northwesttwo.co.uk

UK Citizens Online Democracy’s (UKCOD) main activity is running the mySociety project, building websites which “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives.”

MySociety are the people behind the great web tools TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP and FixMyStreet (a project similar to one comwifinet were hacking up in the distant past…)

I’ve just been emailed about mySociety’s ‘Free Our Bills’ Campaign. Please go and add your weight to the call for Parliament to publish these documents which are a crucial part of the process of making law in a way that is sensitive to the electronic use over the internet.

David ‘web’ Cameron has already endorsed the campaign. But I’m not about to give his site linkage, so you’ll have to find the video via The All Seeing Eye.

I’ve also just found the beta test version of whatdotheyknow.com which aims to provide a public searchable repository of Freedom of Information Act requests made to public bodies. GREAT IDEA! Now the information made public in FoI requests is made public in a much wider sense. The site is open and searchable. The site helps people to make Freedom Of Information Act requests of public bodies, reminds you when the request is timing out (not that it will of course, our public bodies are quick of the mark with these sort of things!) and make all the information in the request public.

Praise is due.

For some feature enhancements I’d recommend adding something that will take any attachments and process them so they are readable. These public bodies, especially councils, have a habit of replying to electronic messages in the fashion of material messages. It amuses me greatly to see a properly formatted letter, typed out in a word processor… attached to an email with a message saying ‘please read the attachment’. bonkers. So if whatdotheyknow.com could process attachments and display them in the webpage as well as giving us the files to download, that would be great!

Goodbye to del.icio.us and simpy: I don’t get anything out of these social bookmarking services so I’m leaving them. The reason I joined was to share my bookmarks quickly and simply with others, in the case of del.icio.us, with a view to collaborating with others on creating a resource, in the case of simpy and the smithspolitics group.

Yet as I still have a need for quick bookmarking and the global access a website provides me I’ve adopted a clone of the social bookmarking model, scuttle, and installed it here on robdyke.com.

Well… today was last day of term for two @smiths courses: Beyond All Reason and Culture, Globalisation and Power.

I’ve just finished uploading all my Beyond All Reason mindmaps… use with caution…. Click on for some links…

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