A MyGov dashboard that allows every citizen to personalise the explosive growth of government services on the web was proposed today by Gordon Brown.
Brown said MyGov, which will eventually replace DirectGov, will end the current frustration of web users needing to identify themselves separately for different public services. He also said the dashboard will allow the citizen to manage their pensions, tax credits and child benefits, as well as pay council tax, fix doctors or hospital appointments, apply for schools of their choice and communicate with children's teachers.
Numerous media outlets -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and NPR, among others - last night published classified files on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees. The leak was originally provided to WikiLeaks, which then gave them to the Post, NPR and others; the NYT and The Guardian claim to have received them from "another source" (WikiLeaks suggested the "other source" was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks associate who WikiLeaks claims took, without authorization, many WikiLeaks files when he left).
The documents reveal vast new information about these detainees and, in particular, the shoddy and unreliable nature of the "evidence" used (both before and now) to justify their due-process-free detentions. There are several points worth noting about all this:
data.gov.uk was originally run by the Central Office of Information and received funding of £1.2m in 2010-11 from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. In 2011-12, the project was brought inside the Cabinet Office, and what the report calls "further engagement activity with stakeholders" increased the annual running costs to £2m
It should come as no surprise to readers of Datablog that, as editor Simon Rogers puts it himself, "we are drowning in data." We suddenly find ourselves with unprecedented access to torrents of data that could be used to better society.
To help bridge the gap between socially minded organizations and do-good dataists, we started a project temporarily dubbed "Data Without Borders".
Substantial businesses have long "re-purposed" what's available from court proceedings, census publications, CIA atlases, and agency scientific and commercial compilations. It seems plausible that release of, say, crime statistics in Cook County, or water flows of the Colorado River, will be valuable to someone. Which datasets are worth processing first, though?
Specialists widely believe what European Commission VP Neelie Kroes and others have said: "Your data is worth more if you give it away." As with many other IT issues, though the people in the best position to make such measurements are too busy creating the future to invest time rigorously justifying it.