Lynne Featherstone MP: Lib Dems support the Free Our Data campaign (Exclusive)
Free Our Data is a campaign for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens.
Most recently the issue has come to the fore when the Royal Mail threatened to sue the ernestmarples.com website, which provides used to provide a service to translate postcodes to Latitude and Longitude references.
The immediate impact was that various useful services, such as Planning Alerts, Healthwhere and Jobcentre Pro Plus were closed down.
The principle of open access matters, because it is the foundation which will allow us to build our own services to facilitate the democratic process, especially the local democratic process.
Tom Watson the Labour MP has taken up this cause.
I’m pleased that Lynne Featherstone MP, the Chair of the Lib Dem Technology Board has published a statement in support of the aim of free access to public data:
As Chair of the the Liberal Democrat Technology Board – and an MP who believes that the internet should be used to strengthen democracy – I want to declare my support for the Free our Data campaign.
We need postcodes to be owned by the public – not sold to the public. Postcodes are the basic pre-requisite for allowing services to be developed that support democratic accountability.
As an MP, sites like MySociety and others are revolutionising our accountability and the accountability and accessibility of Parliament. But they currently have to operate on the edge of legality – and if our postcodes were set free – could and would be right at the heart of a new politics – an open and accountable politics.
All we need now are the Tories. (If they’ve already some out in support of the principle of free access to public data for the public, do tell.)
Categories: All WW, Campaigns, Comment, Internet / Technical, LibDem, Media, Politics
Glad to hear this. Thought the LibDems had been a bit quiet on this subject, and the more traction we can get on this the better. Now that the boundary issues looks as thought it *may* be solved (though not for six months), the big issues are the de-contaminating of govt & local govt datasets of the Ordnance Survey licence, and the freeing up of the postcode data.
Until then, sites such as http;//openlylocal.com (which I run) will be only able to do a fraction of the public good they should be able to.
C
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Cameron made some (on the face of it) pretty explicit and encouraging commitments to freeing up public data, in a speech back in June:
We’re going to set this data free. In the first year of the next Conservative Government, we will find the most useful information in twenty different areas ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic and publish it so people can use it. This information will be published proactively and regularly – and in a standardised format so that it can be ‘mashed up’ and interacted with.
What’s more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new ‘right to data’ so that further datasets can be requested by the public.
http://puffbox.com/2009/06/25/cameron-pledges-to-free-our-data/
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[...] we all need to join in this fight. I was asked my views – and here they [...]