UK – National Freedom of Information Coalition

Launch of Open Government Licence 3.0

Posted on

Today we have launched the Open Government Licence version 3.0. This follows consultation with users and other stakeholders in the open data community on how the Licence could be developed further to reflect new thinking on the licensing of public sector information.

The Open Government Licence (OGL) is part of the UK Government Licensing Framework (UKGLF) which was launched in 2010. The OGL permits the use and re-use of a wide range of government and other public sector information. This supports the government's policy on transparency and open data.

[…]

Why we’re failing to get the most out of open data

Posted on

An unprecedented number of individuals and organizations are finding ways to explore, interpret and use Open Data. Public agencies are hosting Open Data events such as meetups, hackathons and data dives. The potential of these initiatives is great, including support for economic development (McKinsey, 2013), anti-corruption (European Public Sector Information Platform, 2014) and accountability (Open Government Partnership, 2012). But is Open Data's full potential being realized?

[…]

These Are Some of the Weirdest FOIA Requests Fielded This Year in the UK

Posted on

What's your dragon attack plan?

Freedom of Information Acts are a powerful transparency tool between governments and constituents. But they can also yield to some pretty freaky inquiries–as we found out Saturday when an organization of local governments representing more than 350 councils in England and Wales released a list of the most unusual requests they had received so far this year

[…]

UK Court rules FoI requests can specify file format

Posted on

A new court of appeal ruling could make it easier for journalists to request data under the UK Freedom of Information Act in a specific file format.

The decision relates to a 2010 FoI request to Buckinghamshire County Council for information about the 11+ school entry exam to be supplied "in Excel format". When the council complied with the FoI request a month later, it supplied the applicant, Nick Innes, with 184 pages of data in PDF format instead.

[…]

Op-Ed: Newly Obtained Emails Contradict Administration Claims on Guardian Laptop Destruction

Posted on

[…]

Open government: getting beyond impenetrable online data

Posted on

Mathematician Blaise Pascal famously closed a long letter by apologising that he hadn't had time to make it shorter. Unfortunately, his pithy point about "download time" is regularly attributed to Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, probably because the public loves writers more than it loves statisticians. Scientists may make things provable, but writers make them memorable.

[…]

Princess Diana death dossier is censored 65 TIMES by civil servants

Posted on

Whitehall chiefs have reluctantly handed the Sunday People an official log detailing the hours after Princess Diana died in Paris – but only after massively censoring it.

Civil servants spent five months fobbing off repeated Freedom of Information requests for the British Embassy document. And it was finally released only after Home Secretary Theresa May gave her approval. But the log, typewritten on three tatty foolscap pages, had 65 deletions.

[…]

InfoSec 2014: 17 Percent Of All Thefts In The UK Threaten Victim Privacy

Posted on

Seventeen percent of all thefts in the UK involve digital devices which are likely to contain sensitive information, suggest numbers obtained by Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and regional Police forces in the UK by communications firm ViaSat.

The findings were presented at the InfoSec 2014 conference in London, where it was revealed that the number of data breaches reported to the ICO has increased by ten percent in 2104, but the the regulator is only half as likely to issue monetary fines as last year.

[…]

Top 4 ways to make use of Open Data

Posted on

There's no doubt the UK is leading the way in open government data. Almost 17,000 datasets are now available on the data.gov.uk website – and the benefits of sharing data with the public are obvious: according to theOpen Data Institute, it has the potential to increase custom for services and products, ease information sharing with other organisations, reduce maintenance cost and encourage innovation.

[…]

Sixteen ways (UK) councils can better use data

Posted on

Councils are not doing anything with valuable data that offers insight into the needs of communities, according to the local government thinktank Localis. In their report, based on interviews with council leaders in the UK, they said that local authorities could use data to find out what residents want in a similar way private companies such as Amazon do.

Council leaders said that, particularly around the integration of health and social care, partners were unwilling to share data and that a lack of knowledge about data protection laws was holding things back.

[…]