The Guardian UK Goes Diving...

The Guardian UK tries a little deep diving, looking into underlying data on the success of medical procedures. As Dr. Ben Goldacre explains here, there are problems however let's celebrate that something new appears to be happening.

News sources are increasingly moving towards providing richly supported information that can be analyzed and discerned by intelligent, and presumably influential readers.

With the advent of point-to-point communications via the web, we once again have a 'public' versus the masses. And the public wants good information, not mass marketing.

A Hint at the coming Revolution

In this article from Governing.com we get a hint at the next steps for application development and Open Government.

Bryan Sivak - Chief Technology Officer from Greater Portland - kindly points out:

"We don't tend to release a lot of information about how things work internally," he says. "Once we start to do that and start to get some of that information out there, and start to get interest from citizens and developers in how the internal processes of government can be shaped and changed, I think we can actually start to leverage a lot of value."

Of course, how willing are department heads going to be to let us know how things work 'internally' ? Or for that matter - mayors and counselors ?

Let's see.

Open Data in the UK

Richard Poynder blogs about the movement in the UK in Free Our Data:For Democracy's Sake.

He also discusses the Messina Bridge and the Open Gov efforts of Dr. Marco Fioretti.

Interestingly, the European and Australian projects seem to me to mention budgets and citizens-watching-government more often than the American projects do.

In putting the transparency case to O'Reilly's Andy Oram, Fioretti cited the planned construction of the Strait of Messina Bridge (at an estimated cost of €6.1 billion). When the government announces how many tax dollars it plans to spend on a project like this, Fioretti asked, how can the public know that the costs are reasonable if it does not have access to all the data?

This is just an impression I have from a handful of articles, but I did notice that.

Australia's Gov 2.0 Taskforce report mashup Winner

... is impressive !

Australian Senator Kate Lundy returned from Government 2.0 Expo 2010 and filed this report on her blog. Including this tidbit:

• LobbyLens was the winner of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce report mashup competition. This comp was held on the ANU campus (which was great, ‘cos Canberra’s my home town and I was able to get along and see how things were shaping up….) It shines a spotlight in lobbying efforts in relation to decisions made by government.

http://mashupaustralia.org/mashups/lobbylens/

The LobbyLens network graph application is a step forward in Government 2.0 applications in that:

1) It is animated, colourful and fun to use

2) It shows data that empowers people to form opinions on their government, (i.e. by showing connections between business & government) not just to use killer apps that they have provided for you.

Unfortunately, it's a little unweildy but do check it out nonetheless.

“Social and technological change is pushing government into unchartered waters where it must behave differently.”

Futuregov.net

Dr. David McClure - 'open data guru' - talks about the coming changes to government.

Getting government agencies to embrace open data is a big challenge, he said. “We love scorecards in the US government. We use them to create competition and boost transparency – we score agencies on their open government plans.”

This is revolutionary - creating competition without having an economic system to push it. Does anybody realize what is coming ?

The 3 Phases of Government 2.0

Something like a history of the movement, as early as it still is...

Mark Drapeau

I've seen three phases in what most people would agree is "Government 2.0" -- a phase of surprise, a phase of experimentation, and a phase of solutions.

New Study on Open Government Data

This one from Italy, interesting because it highlights the publication of government project information - costs and goals:

Several problems impelled Fioretti to propose this study:

• Government claims are hard to verify. When the cost of the huge Strait of Messina Bridge project is announced, for instance, how can the public determine whether it's reasonable? (And why, I might add, do most projects experience cost overruns but none ever come in under budget?)

  Marco Fioretti to study open government data in the EU