Disruptive Proactivity

A commentable version of Tom Steinberg’s “Power of Information” review is now up for your comments on on CommentOnThis.com

Government makes available large amounts of numbers about other levels of (local) Government. It locks them up in boring spreadsheets, with dull tables, in much the same way it buries useful information behind the clunky direct.gov.uk portal.

Some of this data is dull, some of it is quite interesting. And when it’s all made available in machine readable formats, it becomes easier to fiddle with it and do nice things which it wasn’t actually ever intended to be used for – such as be the input to a card game. The aim is to win all the cards, by selecting a better metric than your opponent (the computer). Thanks to Matthew for the code

Why do this? Because we can (and I needed an example for the NeSS API although didn’t end up using it due the lack of a postcode lookup file for each LA) and because it’s useful to learn about the country as it is, rather than how we think it is (or we thought it was). There’s much more than can be done in this area.

For that reason, I’ve also done one based on country information (see the iQuango announcement post (which escaped when I pressed the wrong button, so is incomplete – sorry)).