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Today sees the launch of the public beta of data.gov.uk. It's not often you can say the government has done something thoroughly enlightened of which you can feel proud, but today is one of those days. By all accounts the advocacy of Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been hugely important to making this happen - as a top-level persuader, agent of change inside the civil service and public mouthpiece. Maybe the government thought it would do them no harm in an election year to be associated with the star qualities of the web's inventor while he's basking in the afterglow last year's 20th anniversary. But who cares what the motivation is? This is good for lots of reasons:
  • The government is giving the public back the data that we have generated and paid for, or that the government has generated with our money. You'd think that was a no-brainer, but apparently we're a few steps ahead of the USA, who have much less of a tradition of government secrecy than we do.
  • They're actively and sincerely seeking creative collaboration from developers in generating apps and view which will help the public make sense of their data. Probably my favourite so far is Where Does My Money Go?, a dynamic infographic showing the growth of government spending and its distribution around different areas. It's a brilliantly executed example of data-driven graphical storytelling, and one which could genuinely help voters understand issues which are often clouded by rhetoric and politics.
  • The initiative not only opens up data but uses a number of open-source platforms to facilitate that, providing very welcome advocacy for their uptake.
  • data.gov.uk have created Crown Copyright to enshrine an open licence around the data, and one that's deliberately interoperable with Creative Commons 3.0, once again driving awareness and uptake of models for opening up IP.
Taken together, this should stimulate innovation around these data models, innovation in technology and better public engagement with the political questions that sit behind the data. Three cheers.
Matthew

 
 
Respect to the Om Malik's great GigaOm blog for this fabulous info graphic explaining the current economy of the Apple App Store. (via Gizmodo)
Simon
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I've left the BBC twice. The first time was in January 2000, the second in December 2009, ten years apart almost to the week and neatly bookending the noughties. How different the experience is the second time round speaks volumes for the way the world has changed in the intervening decade. Of course there are personal differences – I have ten years less hair, have acquired a family and am moving into a very different and exciting phase of my career as a director of Double Shot Consulting. But these aren't my concern here. What's truly striking is how very much more porous the BBC is a decade on.

The first time I left, my personal connection with the BBC was through some very good friends whose phone numbers and email addresses I kept in various forms of offline storage. My credentials with the BBC were available on request from the corporation, and archives of my personal achievements were spread between CDs, Zip disks (remember them?) and printouts. And that was it. Psychologically, it felt like leaving a continent on a steamer. Now, I remain bound to the BBC by the dozens of gossamer threads that form my personal corner of the Web. Broadly speaking, these break down into the areas of transparency and reputation.

Transparency first: Twitter keeps me up to date with everything from the minutiae of content publication, through conceptual discussion and office banter to the actual conduct of company business (we probably all know at least one person who's easier to reach via TweetDeck than Outlook or, perish the thought, a phone). The BBC has also embraced blogging in a big way, not simply, as many corporations do, announcing exciting product launches to its own advantage (though it does that too, and why not when you have as much to be proud of as the BBC?), but genuinely engaging in debate or exposing its inner workings in a way that’s often authentically personal and true to the medium. The BBC also boasts a small army of pretty brilliant personal bloggers who pursue their obsessions, share knowledge, air difficult questions, poke and prod at and generally hugely enhance the reputation of the BBC in the public space.

Weirdest are shared private web spaces like Basecamp or Google Docs where if I wanted to I could snoop morbidly on or even sabotage my former colleagues' activities. I share access to files from projects long since completed with many others who have also left their former jobs, as well as more up-to-date material. (This is because of the surprising paradox that those developing and using the web have failed to develop an instinct for the future, or at least for the present as the future past. In everything from the sharing of possibly confidential information to sewing our online identities, we and the tools we use consistently think too little and too late about how we will manage closure. I guess this reflects the preponderance of young people among developers and users of web tools, and it's also bound to change as the first web generation ages and penetration spreads – but I digress.)

However the digression has segued me nicely into my second theme, reputation. Have I really left the BBC? Can I really leave it? My smiling, woolly-hatted face still adorns a handful of BBC blog posts (oh, and these too). Leaving this kind of public trail is something that celebrities and public intellectuals have been used to for years, I suppose, but I’m certainly not the only ordinary citizen who’s occasionally brought up short by the unaccustomed permanence of the words and images we carry in our wake.

Slightly kinder and safer is the relationship we have with managed spaces like LinkedIn, where we can put our relationship with past employers on display to our own advantage. Facebook still has me pegged as belonging to the "British Broadcasting Corporation" network (which I don't ever remember joining). But conversely, in a social space we also rely on other people to remind us who we are and certify us to the world. Facebook won't let me join the Oxford University network because I never had an @oxford.ac.uk email address. So did I really go there? Again – issues of the cusp generation.

So why am I still obsessing over the BBC? Partly it's because leaving this time round is less like leaving on a steamer and more like an amicable divorce where the couple carries on living in the same house and using the same furniture. So it would be unnatural not to obsess over it. Also because the BBC is unusual and generally pretty exemplary in its embrace of transparency. But more importantly, the porosity of the BBC reflects a wider truth, that companies worldwide are lifting the veil, willingly or not, on their activities. We have blogging policemen, soldiers and civil servants too. Technology has hugely blurred the boundary between corporate and personal identity. How companies and organisations can harness this to their benefit and the benefit of the commons is going to be a pretty big question for some time to come.
Matthew