Show Us A Better Way winner: Can I Recycle It?
The overall winner of the government’s Show Us A Better Way competition is Can I Recycle It, which (inter alia) “will tell people what the recycling facilities are in their area, based on their...
View ArticleWhy privatising Ordnance Survey (and other trading funds) would be the worst...
A story in today’s Sunday Times, ahead of Monday’s Pre-Budget Report, suggests that Ordnance Survey, the Forestry Commission, Land Registry and some other trading funds will be privatised: A string of...
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In the Guardian: the mystery of the vanishing addresses
Thursday’s Guardian Technology looks at the mysterious ways in which addresses within some postcodes are simply vanishing from the Postcode Address File (PAF) – that enormously useful index of places...
View ArticleIn the Guardian: what happens to the Postcode Address File in a Royal Mail...
With Lord Vold… Mandelson looking to persuade a private partner, likely TNT, to take a minority shareholding in the Royal Mail, the interesting question arises of what happens to the ownership of the...
View ArticleIn the Guardian: Ordnance Survey’s future awaits budget; Peoples’ Map launches
In the Guardian, Michael Cross notes that Ordnance Survey’s future is quite possibly going to be determined by the Budget. In Ordnance Survey’s future to be mapped out on budget day, he notes that The...
View ArticleGovernment hits free data decision into the long grass
We have the inside track on what’s going to happen at Ordnance Survey – which will be formally announced this morning. Today’s Guardian says, in Government ducks free data decision: The government has...
View ArticleMichael Cross: setting data free is an easy promise when in opposition – so...
Michael Cross, co-founder of this campaign, has an article at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site on the Conservative pledges on data made on Thursday by David Cameron. Of note: The three-year-old Free...
View ArticleDigital engagement, widening and public data getting analysed… in private
Stephen Timms reports that there’s been good progress in Making Public Data Public. As the Digital Engagement blog notes: So far our request for developers to “get excited and make things” has so far...
View ArticleTim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt on the benefits of open data
TBL and Nigel Shadbolt, who are together pushing along the open data idea in government, have an article in the Times (London) of November 18 about the benefits of free data, following on from the...
View ArticleDaily Telegraph: making stuff free can create revenues
Hey, look, even the Daily Telegraph – hardly a home of the idea of the free lunch – is reprinting Breaking Views pieces which point out that making data free brings bigger benefits. UK map giveaway...
View ArticlePostcodes to be free? But which ones?
The BBC has a piece saying that “postcodes” will be free from 2010: Currently organisations that want access to datasets that tie postcodes to physical locations cannot do so without incurring a...
View ArticleConsultation update: still invisible, but asked in Parliament
Ordnance Survey says it’s for the Department of Communities and Local Government that’s in charge of the consultation over making its data free…. According to this Parliamentary answer, DCLG thinks so...
View ArticleData.gov.uk: now that’s what we call a result
The official launch yesterday of data.gov.uk, with an index of 2,500 datasets provided by government departments, is fantastic news – and a significant milestone for the Free Our Data campaign. It’s...
View ArticleWhat should be done with Royal Mail’s PAF? (From 1999)
This letter first appeared in the Financial Times on Friday July 30 1999. (You can see it at http://twitpic.com/z7y0m – which we can’t embed it for technical reasons.) We’re using it here because it’s...
View ArticleGoodbye Gordon Brown: but thanks for the data … and the campaign goes on
Gordon Brown’s stint as prime minister is over. But we can thank him for one thing he left behind: the commitment by the Treasury to fund free data from the Ordnance Survey (by my understanding, for at...
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