The thing about useful stuff is

Recycling in London - a winner Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The UK Government has announced the winner of a competition designed to find better ways that the Government could make public data available. "Show us a better way" selected 5 ideas including one which has resulted in the website "Recycle for London", which highlights places in London you can recycle and opportunities to increase your recycling.

It provides useful details about local services including opening times and materials that can be recycled.

Sadly the site seems wedded to London Borough boundaries, highlighting services that may be on the far side of your borough rather than closer ones which may cross a border into the neighbouring borough. This may be at the insistence of the Councils themselves who only want to bear the cost of their own ratepayers, or it could be poor site design. Either way, it seems at odds with energy efficiency considerations.

Full details of the competition winners were reproduced from the official site were

Ideas where we hope to create a fully working tool

Ideas where we will develop the idea further

Prototypes we will be funding to be developed further

UK School Maps (showing where the UK’s schools are - building on data released for the competition by the Department for Children, Schools and Families);
School Guru, which helps determine whether your child could get into a school (in Hertfordshire only at present);
Where’s the Path, with an Ordnance Survey map and Google Maps satellite picture of any spot; and
UK Wreck Map, showing the location of undersea wrecks around Britain’s coast.

The fabulous thing is how the public's efforts can
- identify great ideas at little or no cost via crowdsourcing
- build useful solutions provided the data is made available from the closed data stores held by Govt at no cost

Labels: Google Map, London Borough, Ordnance Survey, UK Government

posted by John Wilson @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link ,

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Anti-terror laws abused again for non-terriorst purposes Thursday, October 09, 2008

After the use of terror suspect laws by the US authorities to extradite UK bankers in connection with Enron, the UK Government has followed suit by using the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, passed after the September 11 attacks, to freeze Landsbanki’s estimated £4bn UK financial assets.

The reason for the seizure is to prevent the repatriation of assets back to Iceland and to allow the Government to recoup sums to cover the Icelandic Deposit Protection payment shortfall.

There are reportedly 300,000 Landsbanki depositors in the UK who will be hoping to get the same protection as those in Icesave.

Whilst the motives of the Government may be "pure" and their inventive use of law may have achieved the best outcome for UK plc, I am greatly concerned that laws enacted to provide Government with sweeping powers are being used for a purpose other than that which they were intended.

When passed into law, Government Ministers were undoubtedly providing assurances about why such laws were required [not including banking crisis], how they would obviously be responsible in using such laws to fight terrorism and laughing off concerns about the potential misuse of sweeping powers - much like the debate over detention without charge for 42 days has played out.