Report Update 2

The editing and presentation of the final report has taken longer than originally anticipated so it could not appear this week.

Our aim is to preserve all the beta version text and comments so this can still be read online along with the final report. And we are trying to create good clean document copies in various formats. All this is non-trival for the small Taskforce team to do but we are nearly there now.

In the meantime, you may be interested in looking at the UK government’s updated open source software policy and the excellent Netvibes dashboard for discussion about this.

Richard Allan, Taskforce Chair

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Report Feedback

The beta version of the Taskforce report has attracted several hundred comments which we have been working through this week as we draft the final version. I hope that we will be able to make this final version public at the start of next week.

Perhaps not surprisingly the section on geospatial data has attracted the most discussion with over 30 comments registered.

A number of these have asked for more emphasis to be placed on access to address and postcode data and others have picked up the issue of ‘derived data’.

On the derived data issue the guidance sent to local authorities about the incompatibility of OS and Google Maps licenses is very instructive. This reinforces strongly the view that there is a problem we must urgently address if a public body cannot plot the location of public services on a map and then display this on commonly used platforms like Google Maps.

Richard Allan, Task Force Chair

Report Delivery

We have now produced a beta version of our report back to Government.

This will be open for comments for 2 weeks and we will then make any final edits based on the feedback before presenting this to our sponsoring Minister, Tom Watson MP.

It has been an interesting exercise over the last few weeks putting the report together on a wiki and then publishing it using blogging software (more WordPress) tailored to allow commenting. As a separate exercise we may document the Taskforce’s own working practices for others in government to learn from these (both the positives and the negatives).

Richard Allan, Taskforce Chair