Government responds to the Power of Information Review

I'm happy to see that the Government has accepted most of the recommendations in the Power of Information review. You can see Sam Smith's annotatable version here.

I'll try to keep a close eye on what acceptance means in practice, and will hopefully be able to answer questions from the implementation teams. I may even start referring all the people who phone and email asking if they can get postcodes & boundaries & maps for their non-profit purposes towards the civil servants responsible for getting them more information ;)

Comments

[Alex]

Tom

From what it says on Fixmystreet, the programming team has been able to get most of the geographical and other information from the relevant parties.

Should we start a site where all the government's open responses that contain such information are posted ?

opengovernment.org ??

[Tom Steinberg]

Hi Alex,

I'm not quite sure what you're asking for here. FixMyStreet gets data that other non-profits can't have because it was built using government funding. This means it gets covered by the Pan Government Agreement between the Ordnance Survey and the sponsoring ministry.

The need for more information is not for people in mySociety's lucky position, it is for the keen people without government contacts.

best,

Tom

[Kathryn Corrick]

Congrats Tom!
Acceptance could mean lots in practice, but the announcement from the government is quite a step forward from anyone's point of view.