I spent Saturday at “barcampUKgovweb” and met a very interesting group of people who care about how government behaves online. Among the 60 or so participants, there was a roughly even split between people working for government, people working for companies and people who are - for want of a better term - civic hackers.
It was encouraging to meet so many civil servants who believe that the UK government has some way to come in terms of transparency and responsiveness. My Freedom of Information case against the Rural Payments Agency has now been running for more than two years, with the UK government resisting my farm subsidy data requests at every turn. I presented the farmsubsidy.org project, and people seemed interested, which is always nice.
It was fascinating to see inside Google’s London HQ, where the meet-up was held. Picture the bastard offspring of a fraternity house and the Apple Store, if you can. I wonder if the hardworking Googlers are encouraged by senior management to bring in traffic cones, inflatable birthday cakes, lifesize cardboard cutouts of Princess Leia and other items of flair to decorate the open plan offices, or whether they are just young and kerayzee enough do it of their own accord. Having said that, all the Googlers I met during the day were smart and utterly charming. They had given up a day’s work to look after us, after all. Having said that, I did get chatting to a woman who manages Google’s advertising sales to the UK government and she refused point blank to give me any clue to how many taxpayer pennies the government spends on buying Google adwords. I wonder…FOI time?
A random selection of things I learned during the day:
- Richard Pope’s excellent Planning Alerts has 50% coverage of UK Local Authorities. A neat and very useful tool.
- The government of Sardinia publishes data on recipients of EU structural funds, largely because its governor (who owns Tiscali, the ISP) is a techophile. Hungary is using the internet as a way of facilitating public oversight of public spending as an anti-corruption tool.
- The United Nations has a debate on the invasion of the Falkland Islands scheduled every year (it is always deferred) but never debates invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, Julian Todd at unDemocracy is still on strike.
- Peter Hain’s recent fall from grace has its origins in the decision of a badly-treated junior member of staff to leak some internal documents. Moral: it pays to look after the ‘little people’.
- One of the main movers behind Public Whip and TheyWorkForYou.com has never sat in the Gallery to watch a real live sitting of the House of Commons.
- The Barcamp method of not planning in advance particular sessions, and instead using the first session to rapidly draw up an agenda sounds like a recipe for chaos but really does work.
My thanks to the organisers who put in a lot of work beforehand and to all those who came to show, tell, talk and plot. Lots more discussion and information over here.