For once, a government IT project seems to be working. Hurrah! And once again, it’s a Conservative idea… The new site will publish all sorts of government data sets in such a way as to allow us mere mortals (well, those of you with good excel skills…) to manipulate it and get all sorts of useful bits of information out of it.
There are some very specific items on there - nearly 3,000 sets of data. I can’t believe, however, that the government has that few sets. Even on the national statistics website which is a total pain to use, there are lots more. Hopefully they will put more on there as time goes by.
What does concern me is that useful data sets of information which – do remember – we have paid for might be withheld for commercial reasons.
For example, look at this post from the BBC’s doughty freedom of information campaigner Martin Rosenbaum. Now the BBC is not generally known for being great at releasing information itself, but that is beside the point here. Mr Rosenbaum has converted the VOSA’s pdf (ie bulky and basically single-line document) of MOT failure rates into an excel spreadsheet (ie something you can use to compare cars). The VOSA had fought against the publication of anything for 18 months, arguing that releasing the information would be commercially damaging to manufacturers whose failure rates appeared high, or which had specific points of failure with particular vehicles.
Umm… well, yes, that surely is the point of having access to this information? It enables people to weigh up, for example, their desire to be seen in a beautiful and interesting car with not very reliable electrics, versus something that is more workmanlike but easier to maintain.
I’ve written before about the empowerment that having access to information brings. Having control over your life is one of the things that makes people happy – and one way to increase the control you have is to increase the amount of clear, transparent and usable information you have. So a limited well done to the government but do remember – it’s already our information, we’d like a lot more of it please.
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Killer final sentence!