Disruptive ProactivityMotivations for What I Work On (short piece)
I generally do anything, be it climate, democracy, transparency, human rights, or the multitude of other disruptions, because it’ll disturb the present to serve the future.
What did you see?
My blog is read by a number of Government types. If you are, and you were at any of the ukUncut demos, or Trafalgar Square, or the TUC march on 26th March, then from you I need a favour: spend the next 4 minutes reading the rest of this post. If you owe me a favour, consider every one of them called in.
Why do I work on what I do?
There was some talk on twitter about the gulf between the different people who work on “open government” type projects. 
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Clicktivism and Slacktivism – ECF debate talk slides
The slides from my talk at the ECF debate are available here. This is a auto-scheduled post, so notes, changes and anything else will get posted as a separate post in the future.
My talk starts at 5:15 in to the video.
I’m talking in Oxford on Monday
I’m one of the panel at the Activism vs Slacktivism debate on Monday in Oxford as the opening event in the eCampaigning Forum.
There’s a small fee for attending the talk in person (if you really want to come, I can probably bring one friend along as my guest), but there’ll be a livestream and videos online afterwards, but the core of my talk will be based on previous comments here about 38degrees, and other things that have been mentioned in my other place. My slides will autopost here about 6pm on Monday.
Thoughts on Mail.app, pine, and terminals
Like many of my friends, I spend most of my time in the terminal, and hence, for over a decade, I ran pine as my mail client. I still spend a huge amount of time in the terminal, but for a while recently, ran Mail.app on my mac, rather than pine (yes, I know it’s been renamed alpine about 3 years ago, but the finger programming is still there, as is the symlink).
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Public Data Corporation consultation closes at the end of this week
The Public Data Corporation consultation – on “Plans for a Public Data Corporation” closes at the end of this week. If you’ve not had a look at their questions yet, you probably should (if you read this, you’ll be interested).
In many ways, this is the big enchilada. This could be the biggest decision that cements many of the things that have been fought over for many years. If the PDC is set up in the right way, even though it wont be everything we want it to be, it’ll be a defined process for opening up currently closed data where there is no process.
Even if that process could teach James Dyson something about sucking, it is a process which can be improved in future. This is vital.
We must thank the Civil Servants who put together such a strong consultatoin, and for the questions they asked. They’re open, interesting, and asking questions that challenge and consider the very nature of the PDC. There are a number of people and organisations with specific interests which would like a very different PDC to that which would offer the most (or indeed, any) benefit to the open data community.
If you haven’t responded yet, then you should. If you read my blog, you probably already know that.
But, more importantly, we should encourage others from non-data group with which we also work to make their voices heard. If the only people who remotely engage with the PDC are open data activists, then the open data agenda will deserve to return to the sidelines from whence it came.
The consultation is here: http://pdcengagement.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/pdc/