[Summary: A brief critique of the ‘openness score’] A recent Cabinet Office press release, picked up Kable Government Computing states that: “The average openness score for all departments is 52%”. What’s an openness score I hear you ask? Well, apparently it’s “based on the percentage of the datasets published by each department and its arms-length […]
In October the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI) released a short discussion paper based on the idea of building a ‘National Information Framework’ to build an ‘information infrastructure’ for the United Kingdom. The idea of an information infrastructure draws upon the metaphor of physical infrastructure – noting that governments play a role planning, […]
[Summary: notes on another open data consultation response] As if to provide plenty of opportunities for procrastination from working on my PhD, government is providing a constant stream of open data related consultations right now. Next up, a consultation on the Code of Practice to be issued concerning the ‘Right to Data’ introduced by the […]
Cross posted from my personal blog. [Summary: some preparatory notes for a response to the National Pupil Database consultation] The Department for Education are currently consulting on changing the regulations that govern who can gain access to the National Pupil Database (NPD). The NPD holds detailed data on every student in England, going back over ten […]
Update 23rd May: Updated link to the draft paper, and revised (clearer) version of the complementarity diagram. There’s a general perception that, for most open datasets, it’s still pretty tricky to do really useful things with them. Whether it’s the need for data to be better cleaned and annotated, the need for shared source code […]
The following poster (also available on the report pages – please link there if referencing) was presented at the ‘Web Science: A New Frontier’ satellite meeting at The Royal Society Kavli Centre, 29th September 2010 and summarises some elements of the study. Click the image to access a full-size version on Flickr, or find a PDF copy […]
Hadley Beeman has been doing some fantastic work developing conversations and ideas to meet many of the challenges that current open government data users are encountering. You can read her latest update on the project over here. What I meant to be a short comment turned into a blog-length set of reflections, so – reposted […]
I shared some the draft findings of this study at a West Midlands Open Data event last week. I was speaking right before lunch, and the programme had over-run a little – so what you get in the video below is somewhat of a brisk canter through where I’d got to as of last Wednesday […]
One of the approaches I’ve been using in trying to analyse the 50 or so different cases of open data use I’ve collected in this study is to divide up the different processes of data use. I started with a simple schematic, and building on the theoretical reading I’ve been doing around data and information, […]
The FutureEverything conference today has been a veritable festival of open data talks and inputs, including inputs from Will Perrin, Chris Taggart, James Darling, Emer Coleman, Carole Goble, Nigel Shadbolt, Zach Beauvais, Jordan Hatcher and David Eaves. Whilst many speakers have been talking about the challenges of getting open data up online – challenging organisational […]
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