Workshop on Finding and Re-Using Information

The Open Knowledge Foundation is organising a workshop on finding and re-using public information which is supported by the PoI Task Force.  For full information see the OKF website entry.
Details are as follows:

When: Saturday 1st November 2008, 1030-1600
Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS. (See map.)
Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicInformation
Participation: Attendance is free. If you [...]

Washington DC Competition and Data Catalog

The District of Columbia in the US is running an interesting competition called AppsForDemocracy along similar lines to our ShowUsABetterWay competition.
Entries are requested for innovations using data that is being offered by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO).
The data is really well presented in a Data Catolog.  This appears to be both very [...]

A Good Postcode Summary

Tom Steinberg on the Task Force has drawn my attention to this very good summary of the situation with postcode data in the UK from the Spatial Miscellany.
A dataset that reliably links postcodes to all the common aggregation boundaries and to geographical coordinates remains a key element of an analysis layer for many uses of [...]

International Development Blogging

I have spent some time looking at the Department for International Development blogging site and am impressed by the way it operates.
The terms and conditions it sets out for users are very clear.
The use of mapping is good, especially given the wide geographical scope of potential posters.
It offers RSS feeds in a clear and prominent [...]

Presentation to Information and Records Management Conference

I presented last week on the PoI agenda at the Information and Records Management conference in Southampton and promised to post my slides on this site in case anyone wanted a copy.  So, here they are…
Power of Information Presentation – Southampton – 16th Oct 2008
Richard Allan, Task Force Chair

Unlocking the Power of Local Government Information

Having gathered some advice from colleagues, this is our draft recommendation for local councils wanting to follow a Power of Information approach:
- Ensure you have a copyright notice or a licence to tell people what they can and can’t do with your information (which is also your intellectual property). Every local authority owns [...]