Open Knowledge Conference/Program/Local Government Data

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Back to OKCon 2010 Program
Back to State of the Nation session

Title

Local Government Data

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Authors

Chris Taggart

Keywords

open data, open government

Abstract

Paste abstract in here.

Full text

http://www.slideshare.net/countculture/open-local-data-presentation-for-okcon

Notes and comments

Talk 2: Chris Taggart Title: Open Local data, Openly Local and The Open Election Data Project

  • It's been a good year, opendata.gov.uk, etc
  • Electoral data is a mess.
  • Councils, NDPB (quangos) are opaque
  • History of OpenlyLocal
  • Manchester project call MCC work for you
  • Screen scrape 140 councils (of 434)
  • availaible as RDF, JSON, XML
  • Future
  • more data
  • Use case: Private Eye
  • order investigation by the district auditor was a buried PDF
  • Local authorities now have a duty to engage
  • About power = assymetry of information
  • Raises the barriers to involvement.
  • Private companies who are outsourced by public money are closed.
  • OpenElectionData project
  • *succeed, or fail forward*
  • there is no public database of local election results
  • publish RDFa from page.
  • beginning to compile a database of election results
  • if it fails, there is a good argument for legislation
  • guessing anywhere from 12-40 councils who will publish data.
  • What we need?
  • A Freedom of Data act - too many different bodies to individually organise
  • central gov't needs to change how IT is done. <-- change use of MS Office?
  • "enabler or blocker" [sounds a bit like G.W. Bush's with us or against us meme -Tom]
  • we just need an 'axis of evil' /dff
  • Access of Evil is more appropriate, since Access is evil. -Tom :)