Another consultation: ‘Open data’

LOVELY. Another consultation from Her Majesty's Government: this one on ‘Open data’.

This one offers opportunities to strengthen freedom of information, in the interests of decent journalism.

But the suspicious mind of the Freelance wonders whether certain famous web search engine will use it to lobby for data to be open to, er, Google.

Anyway, the deadline for submissions is 27 November. Printing 56 pages now to read on the Tube...

08 September

The proposals are, in essence, that there should be a presumption that providers of public services release both documents and databases proactively, rather than requiring Freedom of Information (or indeed Data Protection or Environmental Information) requests.

The devil, as ever, will be in the detail. So we'll have to re-read the **** thing.