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Freeing Data Will Change Politics Dramatically
By Andy | March 12, 2009
The spin of government has left me quite cold these last few week, hence the silence of the blog. As Bob Piper says I do blow hot and cold about my blogging. But I don’t want to post things when I feel I have nothing to say!
Today, however, sees the launch of a truly important initiative that will transform the nature of political debate, research and campaigning.
The Guardian has today launched its Open Platform programme. Currently at the beta testing stage, when fully running, the service will allow anyone to make use of Guardian content for free. Blogs and web services will be able to use API search codes to automatically link to articles and comment pieces. But there’s more. The Guardian is publishing a whole series of data sets for public domain use. These are published in the form of Google spreadsheets (compatible with Excel). While early days the current data sheets available over things from the economic performance of governments and economies to the numbers and origins of asylum seekers. They make an easy source of hard data for researchers, students, policy thinkers and — yes — bloggers.
The Guardian have a commercial angle on this. The only condition for using the material is that your feeds will cary guardian advertising. The Open Platform will create for them a new advertising platform. But the Guardian also has public service morals and aims and objectives. They want us to have access to the raw data on which they base their comment.
To some extent they are showing government the way forward, and have been for a while with their free data campaign.
Looking at the datasets I’ve already thought of a number of series of contributions that I can create using this material. we’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks.
This will pose real challenges for politicians. Look back to last weeks shameful attack by Phil Woolas on the National Office of Statistics. Brown introduced a new code of conduct designed to reassure the public that politicians were not filtering and manipulating statistics. Brown realised there was a big issue here, but it seems many of his ministers have not understood the importance of this move.
Increasingly data and now analysis is being made open source. This will the biggest challenge to ‘Spin’ yet.
The big question is whether politicians — of all parties — are up to the tasks of operating in an open source world.
There are already some early demos of what people have done with this data. Go and have a look at it.
And if you’re interested in the new open source, news, world — go have a look at Daylife: a new way to explore the world. This may be the news framework of the future.
Ministers are well known for their disdain for the Guardian and Guardian readers. The Guardian, however, should be congratulated for such an initiative. Nobody has yet cracked how quality journalism and comment can be used in this open. multi channel world. I’m sure there is still a market for quality writing and I’ll be fascinated to see how this initiative develops.
Topics: media, technology |
March 12th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Funny, Andy, isn’t it that at one time it was CONSERVATIVE “Ministers well known for their disdain for the Guardian and Guardian readers. The Guardian.
Well, we’ve got that nice Mr Brown in No 10, Hutton banging the war drums at defence, vision of loveliness Caroline Flint would like to see unemployed people not granted access to Council housing (what’s left of it), Blunderwoman at the Home Office - as cruel as she is beautiful, Purnell and his great mate Freud….er no, Freud has gone over to the Tories, hasn’t he?. Oh dear, how sad. (Freudian s*it?) you’ve already mentioned that delightful heap of humanity Phil “Enoch” Woolas, so - hang on isn’t this a LABOUR government?. Er, well, no perhaps not……..