Category Archives: transparency

Press Gazette: Sky News Supreme Court feed ‘attracts 90,000 a day’

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"Sky News’ live video stream from the Supreme Court attracts an average 90,000 visitors a day, according to the channel’s head of news John Ryley. The figure was cited in an open letter sent by Ryley to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke in which he renewed calls for cameras to be allowed in courts. ... Sky News launched its live video feed from the Supreme Court in May."

ReadWRiteWeb: Data.gov & 7 Other Sites to Shut Down After Budgets Cut

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"Today the Sunlight Foundation and Federal News Radio reported that the public projects Data.gov, USASpending.gov, Apps.gov/now, IT Dashboard and paymentaccuracy.gov as well as a number of internal government sites including Performance.gov, FedSpace and many of the efforts related the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort would be taken offline in coming weeks due to budget cuts by Congress."

BBC Open Secrets: Council objections to publication of spending data

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"Ministers have given local authorities a deadline of the end of January to issue online the details of their expenditure on items over £500. The Communities and Local Government department maintains a timeline to display progress towards this. ... But documents obtained by the BBC under freedom of information show some councils have protested to the department about this demand from central government."

Daily Mail: Clegg pledges to expand freedom of information

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"Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg told the Daily Mail ... hundreds more taxpayer-funded and charitable bodies should be subject to the transparency of the Freedom of Information Act, which currently applies only to most public authorities. ... Others expected to be dragged into the FOI net are the Local Government Association, the Advertising Standards Authority, Network Rail and even utility companies. ... [And] the length of time government records are kept secret is to be reduced from 30 years to 20, Nick Clegg will announce tomorrow."

countculture: Videoing council meetings revisited: the limits of openness in a transparent council

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"Last night, I headed over to Maidenhead for the scheduled council meeting to test this out, and either provide a shining example for other councils, or show that even the most ‘transparent’ council can’t shed the pomposity and self-importance that characterises many council meetings, and allow proper open access."

The video below, less than two minutes long, is the result, and as you can see, they chose the latter course

Grey Cardigan: Extract from the November column

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Grey Cardigan applauds Greater Manchester Police's Twitter incident feed but asks the correct question of chief constable Peter Fahy: "Why not set up a permanent, 24-hour feed of police activity to the Oldham-based Manchester Evening News and its remaining associated weeklies? Then you might not have to stage a publicity stunt the next time the government casts a stern eye over your finances."

FleetStreetBlues: The truth about ‘data journalism’: it’s still about the story, stupid

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"[A]midst all [the 'data journalism'] hype, earnestness and spreadsheet-geekery, here's the truth about so-called 'data journalism'. It's still about the story, stupid. ... [S]urely what's shocking is how few stories journalists actually managed to uncover [from recent major data dumps] ... No doubt we'll get better at this. Over time, journalists will learn how to pick out the stories that matter from these huge data releases - and it will help hugely whenever a single news outlet has control of the data, as the Telegraph did with MPs' expenses, so that they can drip-feed the top lines one at a time rather than see the whole lot drown in the 24-hour news cycle."

BBC: Mark Easton’s UK: Whitehall spending: Information overload

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Mark Easton: "With just a few days before today's publication, savvy colleagues worked day and night cleaning, sorting and crunching the data - the kind of effort unavailable to most households. Indeed, my rather outdated spreadsheet software was simply not powerful enough to open the Whitehall master file we built to get an overview of state spending."

Comment is Free: This will be the most transparent and accountable government in the world

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Francis Maude: "The information we are publishing today is not complete and is not perfect; over time we want to give more detail on what the money is spent on and also where it is geographically spent. The information we are publishing today is a start, but we want to go further. Ultimately we want to use this data to allow citizens to have the power to make informed decisions about the public services they use and find out who is making the decisions on expenditure which affect them. We want every voter to see what choices are being made in their name and every taxpayer to see how their money is being spent."