Digital Activists Target Local Data
London: 13 October 2009
BBC NewsTechnology Reporter - Mark Ward - has published an article entitled: Bringing the fight for data home (13 October 2009)
Some excerpts:
“The data held by local councils has become the latest target of digital activists. They are keen to get at the information so citizens can put it to their own uses.Before now the push to get at official data has concentrated on central government.
Moves to open up that data took a big step forward in early October when a few web developers were invited to a trial of the data.gov.uk site. While that data could be all manner of official statistics, data from local councils is more prosaic.
In some cases it is simply a list of councillors and the committees they sit on or it could be who to report potholes to. "What we want is information that the local authority will collect naturally and use themselves but do not publish so other people can use it," said Adrian Short, creator of the Mash The State website. The fight to get at that data could take time because there are so many councils and few share standards on structuring that data.” ....
Some local authorities replied swiftly, others stonewalled and said it would take weeks and cost huge sums to dig out the data. This, despite the fact, that some of those delaying used the same system as those that found it straight away. "People's patience on the internet is almost infinitesimally small," he said [said Chris Taggart, the founder of the Openly Local], "they have a real lack of patience with the bad stuff."
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