Disruptive Proactivity

The UK Government report “Data Handling Procedures in Government: Interim Progress Report” is now on CommentOnThis.com.

A great article about pledgebank which also shows how great Heather is

Is anyone interested and motivated in increasing the accessibility of the minutes of a local organisation? I need a couple of people like that to help with a new project.

A new document on CoT:
The Government Reply to the Fifth Report from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Session 2006 – 2007. HL PAPER 165 — Personal Internet Security.

For why it matters, see the Light Blue Touchpaper blog at Cambridge

So far, TheGovernmentSays.com has had two (informal) requests to take items down.

Neither of these were from the Government, but for items in other related data sources (one from the bailii feed, one from the petitions feed). Of course, we don’t store whole articles, just an extract of these items (the cache is only for GNN sourced articles).

In general, my principle is, if there are legal issues involved, follow those. Where there aren’t, I don’t take it down.

While anyone has the opportunity to speak, and can later extend or revise their remarks, should people get the opportunity to hide the fact that they said anything?

Should we have multiple standards, and if so, for whom?

Comments and discussion on the above are very welcome. While the TGS issues are trivial, it may become a future issue with iQuango.org/news.

I’ve previously taken a look at who writes to their MP, looking at the deprivation of the place in which they live, after an MPs comments about internet availability.

I’ve now rerun the process for MEPs and Councillors, and got some different results.

While the deprivation of the area in which you live makes very little difference to whether you write to your MP, it does make a difference over whether you write to your MEP or your local Councillor.

For more, see the writeup and graphs.

SpinDifferent covers news/briefings from the executives of UK, US and UN, and we have iQuango.org News which looks at news/briefings from the international NGOs.

Given the volumes of posts in iQuango, we can’t just give them a the SpinDifferent column – as they’d drown out the executives as at least one NGO will be talking about that topic every day.

So how should we cross link the two?

Ideas and comments very welcome.

iQuango.org now scrapes the International Monetary Fund and World Bank news pages and puts their news releases into RSS and email alerts, along with existing sources else, based on keywords.

We’ve also added a news list (and RSS feed) to each country page which gives the latest news mentioning that country. Of course, all the normal search functionality is there if you want to be more precise.

Directionlessgov.com got a mention in today’s Guardian.

With 30 million quid to spend each year, hopefully they’ll have nice, useful things to show for it. For those keeping score, our state of financial accounting means we don’t quite know how much Directionlessgov.com costs each year, but it’s somewhere in the region of £8.89 – the cost of the domain name registration.

Looking at Direct.gov.uk’s plans for the future, one thing that various people have talked about in a variety of places is a project called Bureaucracy Bingo or, less pejoratively, UK Feedback. Given the main comment usages of DowningStreetSays.com and theGovernmentSays.com there’s really demand for a CSA conversation site. Although I don’t particularly want to run that one, it’s too depressing as it is.

Taking it a step further, there’s apparantly a great site in the Netherlands which lets their civil servants talk about being civil while also serving. Doing that here would need a good name…

I’ve been interested in finding these numbers for a while, and so am putting them here so I’ll be able to find them again

From The Myth of the Rational Voter, page 8:

“About half of americans don’t know that each state has 2 senators, adn three-quarters do not know the length of their terms. About 70% can say which party controls the House, and 60% the senate. Over half cannot name their congressman, and 40% can not name either of their senators. Slightly lower percentages know their representatives’ party affiliations”.

The heattheme service has been updated to now show a set of scores for the submitted text.

It’s also been reimplemented in perl, so it moves from .php to .cgi, but all existing inbound links will just work, and will continue to work.

I should especially thank Tim Yao for his fog tool for all the ideas behind these enhancements.

One remaining task is to add support for the missing bits of output which you get from GNU diction. Anyone happen to know of a perl module which does this?