Premise

So, who should we talk to?

So here we are, week 2 and this review is just getting started, gantt charts and project plans all sorted.  The next 3-4 weeks present a great opportunity to go and talk to pretty much anyone who has an important role to play in the creation or re-use of public sector data of the non-private/personal kind.

So, the question is "Who?", and what should we be asking? This isn't a mega review that can fix an interview with every department and agency and company and charity in the whole sector and talk to them all in alphabetical order. Instead we need to hunt down examples of good practice and missed opportunities and ask people how they came about, and what's going to happen next. Remember, in particular we're looking for people who've built online communities which help people help each other, as well as public or private data providers and re-users who're mashing up everything that isn't nailed down.

It lives!

Those of you who have long since forgotten you ever had this blog in your RSS feed might be shocked to see it jerk back into life, zombie-like.

These days I tend to post over at the mySociety developers blog , but I have a good reason to come back here for a bit.

I have been asked by the Cabinet Office to help run a really interesting review on two topics close to my heart.

First, the way that the public sector produces and publishes public information, stuff like statistics, data, reports, league-tables etc and what it should be doing or not doing to make this more suitable for the Internet age.

Second, I'll also be looking at the sort of public information that people and organisations also create online, from Wikipedia to the annotations people leave on TheyWorkForYou. Again, the top level question will be whether there are things the government should or shouldn't be doing to help these fields thrive.

I'm posting on this rather dusty blog because this work isn't  being done in a mySociety capacity, and I want a home to talk about this project whilst it's under way. I don't expect many people will spontaniously stumble across this dicussion in the midst of many billions of more interesting pages on the Internet, so I'm planning to do quite a lot of my question asking out on the blogs and on the mailing lists and in the communities where people actually hang out.  But I thought it was important to have a home on the web where people can come and talk about aspects of the review if they feel like it.

I'll be taking about 2 days a week off mySociety to work on this, and it looks like I'll have some research help from the Strategy Unit.  I'm sure I'll work out how to fit in the other 6 days of mySociety work some how...