In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some topline developments in the hyper-local space during 2011. He also asks for your suggestions of great hyper-local content from 2011. His more detailed slides looking at the previous year are cross-posted at the bottom of this article. 2011 was a busy year across the hyper-local sphere, with a flurry of activity online as well
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Tim Davies has done a wonderful job of combing through the fine print of the UK government’s Autumn statement open data measures (PDF), highlighting the dynamics that appear to be driving it, and the data conspicuous by its absence. Here are the passages most relevant for journalists. Firstly, following the money and accountability: “The [Data Strategy Board] body seeking public data
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In a guest post for the Online Journalism Blog, Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti explains how participants at an open data event helped crack open data on German aid spending. This post was originally published in German at Hyperland. How does the foreign aid of Germany support other countries? The Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) releases no details, although about 6
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There are two Cabinet Office consultations taking place at the moment around open data: one around data policy for the new Public Data Corporation (PDC), and another around the government’s policy around transparency and open data strategy. This should be of enormous interest to any media organisation – a key opportunity to influence the availability of information of public interest.
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Various commentators over the past year have made the observation that “Data is the new oil“. If that’s the case, journalists should be following the money. But they’re not. Instead it’s falling to the likes of Tony Hirst (an Open University academic), Dan Herbert (an Oxford Brookes academic) and Chris Taggart (a developer who used to be a magazine publisher)
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This is the fourth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three here. Human capital So here’s person number 4: Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist. Fifty years ago he used the phrase ‘human capital’ to refer to the economic value that companies
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If who are excited about the prospect of open data, but frustrated by its execution (or just one of those people who complain that data doesn’t change anything), the government are inviting comments on what shape the Public Data Corporation should take. It’s a refreshingly simple execution: a WordPress blog with each question as a separate blog post – presumably
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There have been a raft of new sites for data launched in the past couple of months which I haven’t had time to blog about, so here’s a quick round-up: Tim Davies‘ Open Data Cookbook aims to collect “step by step recipes for practical ways to use open data” – a useful complement to GetTheData. The recipes are currently aimed
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Conrad Quilty-Harper writes about the new crime data from the UK police force – and in the process adds another straw to the groaning camel’s back of the government’s so-called transparency agenda: “It’s useless to residents wanting to find out what was going on at the house around the corner at 3am last night, and it’s useless to individuals who
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The Open Knowledge Foundation have published a blog post with notes on a site they’re developing to gather together data from across Europe. The post notes that the growth of data catalogues at both a national level (mentioning the Digitalisér.dk data portal run by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency) and “countless city level initiatives across Europe as well – from
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