The Wardman Wire

This is useful Chapter and Verse if you need to “persuade” politicians to come out in support of Open Data. The Prime Minister delivered a speech on Smarter Government, in London on 7 December 2009. The transcript is here.

“And I can announce today that we will actively publish all public services performance data online during 2010 completing the process by 2011. Crime data, hospital costs and parts of the national pupil database will go on line in 2010. We will use this data to benchmark the best and the worst and drive better value for money.”

“And from April next year ordnance survey will open up information about administrative boundaries, postcode areas and mid-scale mapping.

All of this will be available for free commercial re-use, enabling people for the first time to take the material and easily turn it into applications, like fix my street or the postcode paper.

And I can further announce today that, again from next April, we will also release public transport data hitherto inaccessible or expensive and release significant underlying data for weather forecasts for free download and re-use.”

(Hat-tip Etienne Pollard via email)