Open data, fraud… and some worrying advice
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmcl/ One of the most commonly quoted concerns about publishing public data on the web is the potential for fraud – and certainly the internet has opened up all...
View ArticleNot the way to build a Big Society: part1 NESTA
I took a very frustrating phone call earlier today from NESTA, an organisation I’ve not had any dealings with it before, and don’t actually have a view about it, or at least didn’t. It followed from an...
View ArticleVideoing council meetings revisited: the limits of openness in a transparent...
A couple of months ago, I blogged about the ridiculous situation of a local councillor being hauled up in front of the council’s standards committee for posting a council webcast onto YouTube, and...
View ArticleVideoing council meetings redux: progress on two fronts
Tonight, hyperlocal bloggers (and in fact any ordinary members of the public) got two great boosts in their access to council meetings, and their ability to report on them. Windsor & Maidenhead...
View ArticleA first look at the council spending data: £10bn, 1.5m payments, 60,000...
Like buses, you wait ages for local councils to publish their spending data, then a whole load come at once… and consequently OpenlyLocal has been importing the data pretty much non-stop for the past...
View ArticlePlanningAlerts is dead, long-live PlanningAlerts
One of the first and best examples of how data could make a difference to ordinary people’s lives was the inspirational PlanningAlerts.com, built by Richard Pope, Mikel Maron, Sam Smith, Duncan...
View ArticlePlanning Alerts: first fruits
Well, that took a little longer than planned… [I won't go into the details, but suffice to say our internal deadline got squeezed between the combination of a fast-growing website, the usual issues of...
View ArticleHow to help build the UK’s open planning database: writing scrapers
This post is by Andrew Speakman, who’s coordinating OpenlyLocal’s planning application work. As Chris wrote in his last post announcing OpenlyLocal’s progress in building an open database of planning...
View ArticlePlanning Alerts: community scrapers ahoy!
This post is by Andrew Speakman, who’s coordinating OpenlyLocal‘s planning application work. We can now report good progress on our plan to develop community scrapers to underpin the new incarnation of...
View ArticleHyperlocal bloggers to get right to council meetings – by law
Following on from our previous posts on the right to attend, report and record local council meetings, the Department for Communities and Local Government has announced that it will be changing the law...
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