My village’s community centre has the chance tonight to win a £50,000 grant from the People’s Millions. There is going to be a piece on the local news on ITV tonight during the 6pm broadcast, and telephone votes will determined which project wins the money.

Cottenham Community Centre needs the money to help convert the old Methodist Chapel in the village into a thriving community hub, including a coffee shop and other resources to help bring the people of the village together.

If you get the chance, please call 0871 6268804 before midnight tonight to register your vote. More details are below:

Possibly related posts:

• Policing 2.0: The Citizen and Social Media
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Hence, my personal expectations towards the personal democracy forum were quite high when I entered the Torre Agbar tower the next day. The first thing I spotted was that the main hall was completely full – round about 300 people were waiting for Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry to kick of the event with some opening remarks followed by a keynote from Charles Leadbeater.

Leadbeater then talked (keynote audio) about the emergence of cloud culture, a term which has been derived from cloud computing. Using the metaphor of clouds for culture points to the fact that cultural contents are produced in a more and more collaborative and fluid way. Further to this cultural artefacts become too a large extend available digitally with the consequence that more people than ever have access to them via the Internet. “Many eyes make culture rich in the way the more an archive is opened up to many points of views and eyes the more value will be seen in it”, Leadbeater stated. Together with all the available “tools of creativity” which allow to add more value to existing content sort of “cultural mushroom clouds” happened to appear.

At the same time there are reasons to be concerned and challenges which we currently do not really know how to address.

One problem is that structural principles of society run counter against the idea of cloud culture. E.g. politicians facing problems “giving loads of stuff away” and contribute to an anonymous creation of public goods. Instead they have to claim that they are doing things for people and need to take the credits to get elected. Cloud culture took a kind of leadership which politicians were “constitutionally unable to grasp”.

Other problems are that social media are tend to flush away existing business models and ways of content production without yet delivering mature alternatives – one just has to think of the crises of newspapers and the recording industry. Leadbeater said that he is convinced that we will have to figure out how to finance important services like e.g. investigative journalism but he do not think, however, that newspapers are the best approach to it.

The biggest thread in the digital age after all is censorship. Leadbeater: “ I am ashamed actually that a labour government has chosen this three strikes rule and cut people off from their ISPs for file sharing without in the slightest bit thinking that the big story is the freedom of the internet and its impact on democracy around the world. And if western governments do that, if western governments back off that they are just giving an excuse to authoritarian regimes to use that as well”.

Well roared, lion! - this was a good opening keynote and delivered some tasty food for thought. Unfortunately, the examination of the digital society throughout the conference could not constantly keep up this level.

There were way too many presentations and panels dealing with campaigning – at least for my taste. The Obama campaign, election campaigns in general, move on, avaaz etc. pp. The teleologic approach to social media is what they all have in common. Use social media to get more votes for your candidate, to put pressure on politicians, to achieve any kinds of objectives. Campaigners are usually not struggling to find the best arguments or policies, to initiate debates or to improve public discourses. Nor they are interested to involve as many people as possible in the generation of common goals or objectives. No, the goals have always already been defined and the only thing that seems to count is action and mobilisation. But who defined these objectives? And who take care that action leads to better results?

The campaigning approach always implies that good and bad can easily be separated. And that action based on good intentions lead also to good results. It does not require a PHD in sociology to know that both are not always the case in modern society: The road to hell is paved with good intentions…..

As Jeremy Zimmerman from la quadrature du net put it, the set up of effective campaigns presume that you are right. Not right in the sense right vs. left but in the sense of not being wrong. And how did he know that he was right? Well he just knows it and further more trusts on loads of experts consulting his organisation.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of the kind of citizens’ lobbyism Jeremy and others have created while trying to improve the so-called EU Telecom Package (or to obviate the worst, respectively). And yes, I believe he was right in that particular case. But can this really be generalised?

Being absolutely convinced to be totally right seems to be a much more a fundamentalist than democratic attitude. And the only reason politics come into play is the fact that in most cases it can not be simply decided once and for all what is right or true.

It went even scarier when Scott Heiferman from meetup.com enthusiastically shouted out that it is all about the WE and not about THEM and US. Well, this desire for unity has historically led to the worst results one can possibly think of. Here comes definitely the point where I cannot follow anymore. There is us, them and we and I can’t see the benefits of presuming that there are no longer differences among individuals, groups or organisations.

To sum it up: I do not believe that society is generally lacking efficient campaigns and that more social media based campaigns will inevitably lead to better policies. Instead of taking all the implications of the looming digital ideology for granted we should discuss more thoroughly how to cope with the partly contradicting logics of cloud culture and politics. This would also mean to spend more time to explore the relations between socials media based or citizens driven politics and existing governmental structures.

However, as I said at the beginning, I came with quiet high expectations and this is always the safest way to get disappointed. Nevertheless, I wasn’t: This well organised event was definitely worth attending and I met quite a lot of friends and colleagues. I am sure this will also be the case at the future democracy conference taking place tomorrow in London.

Awesomeness off of the internet for November 20th to November 24th:

• Open Government and Government 2.0 Online Conference – Fall 2009 – O’Reilly Media – "When citizens interact with their government, powerful things can happen. It means doing more with less people. It means breaking down too-familiar "cylinders of excellence." Web 2.0 is the industry which has shown that transparency, participation, collaboration add up to increased efficiency. Gov 2.0 harnesses this for the public good…"
• Why Amateurs Build Better Online Communities Than Businesses – FeverBee – "There are few successful online communities founded by businesses. Amateurs usually do it better." Interesting argument.
• We Know The Experts Are Out There. – Expert Labs – "Expert Labs is a new independent initiative to help policy makers in our government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens."
• How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work Andrew McAfee – "Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way companies do business. But can these tools help them achieve their goals?"
• TalkPress – "TalkPress provides hosting of online forums and message boards for organizing and conducting online meetings, gatherings, and interactive discussions."
• Government gets into games business – "The Department for Transport launched an online multiplayer fantasy roleplaying game last week, with the apparent aim of teaching kids to look left and right before crossing the road." By @simond
• OpenSpaceDevon – redefining public services in Devon – Carl Haggerty has set up a Ning site to plan an open space event in Devon to bring the public, third and private sectors together to get stuff done.

The projects co-funded by the EC under the eParticipation Preparatory Action are organising an eParticipation Conference, which will be held in Brussels on Tuesday, 15th of December 2009 at the European Parliament (Rue Wiertz 60, 1047 Brussels, Belgium, Room A.3E2) .

The development and wide use of powerful new ICT applications is transforming the way citizens and civil society interact, debate and participate in public life. These new tools have enormous potential to enhance decision-making processes by involving large numbers of EU citizens.

As the eParticipation Preparatory Action, an initiative of the European Parliament launched in 2006, reaches its conclusion, this eParticipation Conference is being organized to demonstrate progress and results in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to enhance citizens’ participation in democratic decision-making. In parallel, there will be an exhibition of project results produced in the context of the Preparatory Action. This is a unique one-time opportunity to see all the projects in one place and to engage into a conversation with projects’ leaders and representatives.

Register to the conference before 10 December 2009 at: http://eparticipation.eventbrite.com (registration password: momentum)

Note: The Conference is free, but only registered delegates will be allowed entry for security reasons. All the participants should have some type of identification documents (for EU nationals - passports or national ID; for people from outside of the EU - valid passport documents are necessary).

For further information, please visit: www.ep-momentum.eu or contact: momentum@atc.gr

The ministerial declaration

The central outcome of the ministerial meeting was of course the Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment which was presented at the conference by Minster Mats Odell on Thursday. The declaration incorporates three major themes (for an in-depth critical analysis please read this excellent article by Andrea DiMaio):

1. Empowerment and transparency through eGovernment services and the use of ICT
2. Improved mobility in the Single Market by seamless eGovernment services
3. Efficiency and effectiveness is enabled by a constant effort to use eGovernment

From the angle of the Pan European eParticipation Network the first point seems to be the most interesting one. It is good to see that the European Ministers responsible for this area commit to the use of ICT to improve democratic processes and not only administrative efficiency. This view was shared by the audience of the conference as well: In the final session the moderator (Richard Wilson) ask the delegates which of the three goals they think is the most important one and there was an overwhelming majority voting for empowerment and transparency over the other two goals.

This document, even though it leaves a lot of points open to interpretation, will have major implications for eGovernment in Europe in the next years as it is stated to inform the policy priorities till 2015 and provides the European Commission with a number of tasks and powers to work towards the set goals. The commission is now ask to set up an action plan on top of the declaration and to chair the steering group overseeing the implementation of this plan.

The subtext

Maybe more influential than the declaration itself and the policy implications following it was the strong subtext to all of the contributions and talks. From the statements and remarks of the high ranking attendees and in conversations in between panels it was clear that everybody agreed that social media is here to stay and that that the level of electronic communication possible today changes the way we govern ourselves. In relationship to this the force for change represented by the digital natives and those growing up in a digitalized world was referenced many times.

Keeping in mind that the 1.500 delegates present in Malmö are quite influential in their respective fields on the regional, national and European level the fact that social computing and electronic communication are seen as game changing is important. The ministerial declaration is just the visible part of the change of mind happening not only among the digital natives but also among those influencing policy and implementing technologies and methodologies in political and administrative bodies.

What´s next?

With both the declaration covering the policies by the European Commission and other administrative bodies and an open and progressive mindset developing among those shaping the future of eGovernment the next years seem rather exciting. The next step will be to see how the European Commission interprets the declaration and formulates the action plan over the course of the next months. After that the action plan will have to be put in really by all the different actors in Europe – PEP-NET and its members being among them.

The next ministerial eGovernment conference will be held in Poland in 2011. I think this two year time span can be used a test of whether the spirit and the policy decisions of Malmö have a real impact on the development of eDemocracy and eGovernment in Europe.

For another take on the event there is a good article by osimod on the Open Declaration on Public Services Website.

“If government 2.0 is about discontinuity, enabling bi-directional flows and engaging new stakeholders, the EU declaration has failed on every account.”

Personally - the Hungarian Government’s Electronic Center for Public Administration has not even translated the full text, only published an excerpt , without mentioning Open, Accessible, or Transparency, some criterias of good governance, mentioned in the declaration.

Moving beyond

In my previous article, I have been writing about the participatory based, citizen centric event, which ran paralell to the 5th conference. Surprisingly, some of the guests of this unconference has been also participated in the “main” and the research focus “pre”conference, making the cultural flow rich between researchers, practicioners and businesses.

The openness of this conference has let Mats Odell, the minister for financial markets and local governance to hold a pecha-kucha styled presentation about the declaration - which has gained far more acceptance in this form, than in the official one, although

About 25-30 people - he has come to visit us there. It might be the elections, it might be Magnus Kolsjö’s advice, or some personal drive, or even the way, how Sweden is showing approach to open government. Who knows? But the Minister has missed something, by not staying with us, only for half an hour..

The Pretinent Art award - which has been launced before the unconference - winner has become a project of the Open Rights Group: Statebook.

Runners up included the Woberator from Holland, which breaks Ministries’ resistance to FoI requests by spamming them, and Evasori.info, the Italian mashup which maps tax evaders.

Sir Bonar has addressed unconference participants in a video message, which helped to focus on various aspects of diplomacy: see video here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVEwajqxtnk&feature=player_embedded

Beside the fact,that the unconference has been an event, run by citizens with the kind support of the local community place, Garaget, has showed some possible new trend of citizens. It was not yet about the first European Hackathon, or eDemocracy Camp, nor about the HackEu event series. But I am quite sure, that this is the direction, where Europe has to follow it’s forerunner examples, Australia, USA and the UK.

In my presentation held at the preconference, I was trying to show not only some good examples of citizen drived development collaboration (with the state) but to highlight the socio-technological innovation behind it.

Photos of the unconference can be accessed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonz/sets/72157622843812538/

by the way, the well knowwn P2P foundation’s head, Michael Bauwens has made a great presentation on “Open Everything” in for the TEDx Brussels event at the European Parliament:

http://prezi.com/tlsiltvngctq/

I love technology. Actually, no I don’t. I like the idea of technology, and the potential of it. Actual technology generally makes me swear. Anyway, where was I?

So you’ve decided that you need to do something exciting, using technology. Let’s focus on social stuff, as that’s really all I know about. Maybe you’ve put your strategies and policies together and are ready to actually get into some doing. There are a number of approaches you could take:

• Do your best with what you have
• Cobble together free stuff
• Buy something to do it all for you
• Build something yourself
• Some kind of weird hybrid of all the above

What should drive your decision on which route to go down, and what tools you use should depend, of course, on what you need. That sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how few organisations really understand their needs, which are dependent on

• What it is you want to do – in other words, activity
• How you are organisationally set up to approach this

The first point is another classic bit of Briggs stating the bleeding obvious, but it is worth writing this down and being clear about it. What are we talking about here? Replacing meetings with something more useful? Getting greater benefits than you are currently getting from email discussions? Creating a new community of people who are going to help you do all kinds of cool things?

The second point might be worth delving into in a bit more detail.

Issues that should be considered when looking at how your organisation works needs to take into account factors such as:

1. Skill levels in the organisation
2. Desire to share, collaborate and work together amongst staff
3. Security issues around access and data security
4. Hardware people have available, including speed of access etc
5. How much money you have to invest
6. Whether you need to work with and involve other organisations

All of these things may have as big an impact on your eventual choices as the activities bit. If you decide you need an enterprise collaboration platform, and go and procure something really amazing, but nobody in your organisation knows what it is, how to use it, or what the point of it is, then you’ve got a car crash on your hands.

Likewise, if you decide the future is in the cloud, and set up a system to do just that – but only find out from the IT security guys that it’s not possible for the organisation to host its files on various different servers across the globe at the very last minute, again, you’re ending up with egg on your face.

So before deciding on what tools you want and how they are going to work, it’s a good idea to spend some time figuring out the capacity within your organisation to deal with the technology you want to throw at them first – these are just as important as functional requirements and all the other stuff.

Quite a bit of inspiration from this post came from bits of the book Digital Habitats by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D Smith. Well worth a look.

Possibly related posts:

• Selling the benefits
• Social media and local government culture
• A social media software toolkit
• Strategy stuff – a three pronged approach
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I’ve been asked this question a few times recently, so thought it worth sharing my answer with everyone that reads this blog:

What’s the best way to approach editing Wikipedia articles about us?

There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this – the most obvious being that there are some factual inaccuracies that you want to correct – though sometimes there are other reasons too.

There have been several high profile incidents where Wikipedia has been edited – by either the individual who is the subject of the article or by an employee of an organisation with a page on the site – with various degrees of success or humiliation. Here’s my guide to getting more of the former and less of the latter.

My instinctive reaction is: don’t do it. Editing Wikipedia is a minefield and getting it right will take up an awful lot of time. Think about another way around it – could you publish a list of corrections on your own website, or on a blog? Perhaps encourage someone else who reads it to make the corrections, but leave Wikipedia itself well alone.

If you are determined to get involved, here’s what to do. Firstly, do not edit anonymously but create an account on the site. This is for the very good reason that your edits will not be anonymous anyway – your IP address will be recorded and if you are using a work computer, people will easily be able to find out where you are.

Instead, give yourself a username that’s understandable, not some random pseudonym. Then, open your personal user page and edit it to explain exactly who you are and who you work for. What you are aiming for is complete transparency – the last thing you want is people thinking that you are being sneaky.

Once that’s all done, it’s time to edit the entry itself. Or, rather, not – because my advice would be not to edit the text of the article itself first of all. Instead, I’d limit my edits to the article’s talk page initially. Explain in the page the inaccuracies, and perhaps link to the web page I mentioned earlier with a list of corrections. Then let the community do its work – some corrections will be made to the page – maybe all of them. What you are doing is giving the Wikipedians the facts, and allowing them to put their own house in order.

If that doesn’t happen, or if there is an urgent correction that needs making, then edit the text itself. Firstly, make the change, ensuring that you clearly link back to sources to back up your edits – and make sure you use the edit summary box to explain what you have done and why. Then, drop by the article’s talk page and again explain who you are, what change you made and why you did it.

Once all that is done, sign up to get email alerts when the page is changed so you can keep on top of what further edits people are making.

If you find that someone just goes in right away and reverts – that is, removes your edits and restores the page to how it looked before you started – do not get tempted into reverting their reversion! These tit-for-tat “edit wars” do nobody any good! Instead, try and engage with the person making the reversion, again through the article’s talk page, or on that user’s own page maybe. Most Wikipedipedians are friendly, conciliatory folk and you should be able to talk them into being more reasonable.

Of course, if that fails, there is always the Wikipedia arbitration process. Good luck with that.

For more on Wikipedia culture, I found Andrew Lih’s book The Wikipedia Revolution pretty good. Lih is clearly a fan of Wikipedia, so it is hardly an unbiased account, but there is some really useful background in there.

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The JRC-IPTS (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Institute for Prospective Technological Services) aims to provide customer-driven support to the EU policy-making process by developing science-based responses to policy challenges. The Centre has launched two reports which can be fully downloaded from their website.

Public Services 2.0

The study “Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services” is focusing on the rise of the social web and trends in public services. Emphasis is on the impact of social computing on key areas like policy, organissation and law. Future opportunities and risks are also addressed. It provides an exhaustive literature review of research and practice in the area of Social Computing and identifies its key impact areas in the public sector.

Enhancing social capital through social networks

The report “The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy” provides a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing applications and its impact on industry, personal identity, learning, social inclusion, healthcare and public health, and government services and public governance. The study sums up questions like “What is Social Computing?” and provides ideas on enhancing users’ social capital by enabling the multiplication of interactions between offline and online societies. The use of social networks can also contribute to the development of the cultural capital of disadvantaged people and broaden the access to digital content.

Studies on the broad impact of social computing in the public sector are scarce. Apart from examinations of specific computing applications in a public sector, most studies do not examine the generic social computing trend and its effect. The authors also claim that there is a broader theoretical background needed. Further research on digital evolutions should address these gaps.

Drawing together a few discussions I have been involved in recently about the different types of documents an organisation – such as a council – might need to put together to define its approach to engaging online, I thought it might be useful to set out how I think it could be done.

My initial inclination is always to dispense with strategy, to be honest, as process has a habit of stifling Good Stuff, and over strategising leads to attempts at control and general alienation. My second thought is that even if strategy is required, there shouldn’t be any need for anything specific for digital, as really it’s all the same – technology shouldn’t matter.

Realistically, though, at this stage organisations need to feel comfortable with what they are doing, and if that means having bits of paper explaining it all, then so be it. The important thing is to get those bits of paper right. I see a need for three types of document, each of which I will explain below:

1. Corporate strategy

A high level document explaining what the organisation wants to do, and why it wants to do it. Don’t make it tool focused, else it will go out of date very quickly. Keep it broad and general, as the specifics will be covered in the other documents. This should be the paper brought out to win arguments where necessary. Make sure people at the top of the organisation read it, and endorse it: it will be an enabler to get stuff done.

Issues it should cover:

• How important does the organisation see the digital space?
• What are the opportunities and risks, and how are they managed?
• How online interaction fits in with other channels and processes
• An overview of the approach: something like the classic listen, acknowledge, create, share
• How are staff supported in their delivery of the strategy?

2. Staff guidelines

This is the bit which explains in clear terms what staff are enabled to do at work using the internet. There are plenty of good examples available on the web, from the Civil Service guidance, to the BBC, IBM and others. It performs an important role, and should be less about saying what people can’t do and more about encouraging and empowering staff to engage in online conversations.

This should set out how staff are encouraged to engage online, what they can do on their own, and what they might need to seek advice on. My general advice on this is:

1. If the information or content is already published in some form or other, then it should be repeatable on blogs, in forum or whatever without the need to gain permission
2. If something new is being generated, whether a viewpoint or a response to a question, say, then it’s best to get it checked out first
3. If the staff member is at all uncertain, even in the instance of 1. above, get some advice

3. Individual project engagement plans

These form the nitty-gritty of the online engagement work, and there should be one for every digital project undertaken. While the other two documents I have written about are pretty high level – to ensure they remain relevant – with the plans, you can be pretty detailed and focus on activities. These plans should describe:

• What the project is about, and how digital can support that
• What the objectives of the digital work are
• How those objectives will be measured – ie evaluation
• What the roles are and who is responsible for them
• How reporting will work
• Which tools will be used and how
• Some kind of timeline showing when activity will happen, for how long and how it will be shut down.

I reckon this three-pronged approach more or less covers the necessary bases. It would be interesting to hear how people are approaching this area, and how it differs to what I have written here.

Possibly related posts:

• How councils can get started with social media
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Some slides from Google UK here on this topic, presented at the annual Consultation Institute Technologies for participation event in November 2009. Ok, so they are very UK centric but interesting considering 43% of traffic to government sites come from search engines.

We’re beginning to quantify technology savings in a much more tangible way than ever before, timely considering the global recession. Take the recent example of the Los Angeles City Council who are replacing their existing e-mail system (which it has used for the past seven years).

A new five-year contract has been signed with Google mail at a cost of $17.5 million. The city’s current e-mail system has been prone to crashes, which has hurt employees’ productivity. In addition, the city lacked disaster recovery for its e-mail system — a shortcoming that Gmail will address.

The city estimates that moving its 30,000 employees to Gmail will save $5.5 million over five years, reduce the number of servers needed for e-mail from 90 to a few dozen, and cut nine positions from the Los Angeles Information Technology Agency.

I like these slides, from Anthony:

Possibly related posts:

• Tim Davies on effective engagement
• The myth of engaging with everyone
• Selling the benefits
• Blogging and podcasting for local government
• For the last time…stop blocking!

Carl Haggerty has launched a great initiative down in Devon:

Carl writes:

It would be great to get public sector professionals, voluntary organisations and business people involved in these areas all together and working through some of these issues and topics – Basically, i’d imagine the event to involve anyone who has an interest and passion to improve public services in general.

This is an interesting idea, and one I’m totally in agreement with. Take the format used by LocalGovCamp and other unconferences, but make it all about the geographical area. Bring together public, third and private sectors to thrash out new ways of doing things, and hopefully spark the enthusiasm needed for some of the organisational battles required to get stuff moving.

Just the sort of event I was thinking about when I wrote this post after the Lincoln LocalGovCamp.

So if you are in Devon, or just interested, pop along to the network Carl has created and join in the discussions!

Possibly related posts:

• LocalGovCamp Lincoln
• Upcoming events
• Get a job in local gov social media
• LocalGovCamb
• Local Gov is self organising

Awesomeness off of the internet for November 16th to November 18th:

• Welcome to Southwark Circle – "Southwark Circle is a membership organisation that provides on-demand help with life's practical tasks through local, reliable Neighbourhood Helpers, and a social network for teaching, learning and sharing." via @dominiccampbell
• Research report — Media Trust – "A major piece of research, commissioned by Media Trust, reveals there is an opportunity for Community Voices to add real value to current media activities within disadvantaged and isolated communities."
• Why do people want microsites? at Helpful Technology – Excellent stuff from @lesteph
• Social Innovation and the Knowledge Society – Now is the Time. – "The result is that the potential resource of innovative thought remains untapped and local authorities try to deliver what they can’t possibly deliver. What’s wrong with saying to people: this is how much money we have, this is what it will buy, what do you want to keep and what can you deliver yourselves? People have strong views about what they want for their community and if there are things they can do for themselves they will."
• Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day: Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009: The Final List – "Here is the final list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009, compiled from the contributions of 278 learning professionals – from education and workplace learning – worldwide." Via @donaldclark

Awesomeness off of the internet for November 9th to November 16th:

• Digital engagement governance – a dichotomy between hyperlocal or partnership managed by Michele Ide-Smith – "My perception is that developing and maintaining a successful hyperlocal online resource will require commitment, coordination (of volunteers), skills (e.g. researching, investigating, writing, communicating, technology), time and local knowledge. Tenacity and a willingness to work with a diverse cross-section of community members will also be invaluable."
• WordPress › XEN Carousel « WordPress Plugins – "Call out sections of your site by easily creating a carousel of images, associated to posts or pages, for display on your home page or anywhere on your site."
• BBC – dot.life: Computing for older users: Patronising or practical? – "Whether or not Simplicity Computing succeeds will be a big test of two things – the appetite of older people to get online and the attractiveness of open source software as a means of dealing with digital exclusion."
• Tom’s Planner | Gantt Chart Software | Faster than Excel easier than MS Project – "Tom's Planner, allows you to create and share Gantt Charts online with "drag and drop" sim- plicity. It has great ease of use and gives control back to the project manager."
• Google Apps adds Postini security software – Techworld.com – "When completed, this extension of the Postini security and management capabilities could go a long way toward calming concerns from CIOs and IT managers about using Web-hosted software like Google Apps." – a potentially important move for use of Google Apps in government? Via @monkchips

“It is vital for democracy that the citizens participate in decision making,” said the European Commission Vice President, Margot Wallström. Starting next year, the signatures of one million EU citizens will be sufficient to provide the Commission with issues to negotiate.

However, certain details have yet to be clarified: In how many different nations should the signatures be collected? How can be determined whether the signatures are authentic? Should there be an opportunity to participate online in the citizens’ initiatives?

A so-called Green-Book is supposed to push forward the concrete embodiment of the citizens’ initiative. EU citizens have the opportunity to send in their suggestions and opinions via mail or e-mail until the end of January 2010.

According PoliticsOnline, Peter Greenberger and his team have played a key role in enhancing transparency and democracy in the United States, which significantly change the worldview of politics among citizens.

A presentation to see in video: [To watch the video]

Vicky, from Boilerhouse and Socitm, pops by to tell us about the latest developments with the public sector web professionals network.

On 27 November, Socitm will be holding a workshop as the first stage in a project to define a professional skills framework for people who work on public sector websites.

This is part of it wider initiative to set up a web professionals group for this large and diverse group that includes:

• programmers and coders
• web developers (with technical skills)
• web designers
• content managers/editors
• social networking experts
• measurement/monitoring specialists
• web marketers
• web managers
• customer service or IT heads with web responsibilities
• e-communications professionals

The initiative kicked off earlier this year with a meeting called by Socitm and involving web managers and practitioners from local government across the UK, central government departments, the government supersites, and the third sector. Also present were representatives form some existing and past groups formed by webbies, including the Public Sector Web Professionals Group, SPIN and the Scottish Web Forum.

There was general agreement among those present that meeting web practitioners’ professional development needs would in future need more than informal groups, voluntary effort and free networking tools. It was also recognised that defining a skills framework for web practitioners and organising training, development and possibly accreditation around this framework would be a core activity for any professional group formed.

Following this meeting Socitm commissioned research to identify whether any other professional association or skills organisation was already doing or planning to do something similar. Discussions were held with a range of professional and skills organisations in ICT, interactive media, marketing, communications and publishing. We also talked with the CoI and the Government Communications Network about their plans in this area, and made useful contact with the Federal Web Managers Council in the USA. Contact was made with some web networks in the NHS to share and discuss idea, leading to some positive feedback about the potential for webbies in the health sector to join our activity.

At this point, the Socitm agreed in principle to set up a web professionals’ interest group for people involved in any aspect of web management and development. Individuals at any level of seniority or career stage, employed or freelancing in the public or third sectors, or in any organisation working with them would be open to join. The group would then run under the Socitm constitution, with the group electing a chair and officer and developing a programme of activity supported by Socitm’s paid staff. Members would be eligible for the normal benefits of Socitm membership as well as additional benefits exclusive to ‘web members’.

As well as agreeing to set up a group or community for web professionals, Socitm agreed to fund initial development on a skills framework. This is seen a central to the development of a sustainable future programme of activity that will attract web professionals to join and support the group. The workshop on 27 November marks the start of this activity

We are looking for people with experience of managing web teams in the public sector to get involved in this activity. There are a limited number of places available at the workshop, and a wider opportunity to participate in evaluating and offering feedback on the initial framework developed at the workshop.

If you would like to get involved, please complete the form to tell us a little more about your relevant skills and experience, and whether you are willing and able to attend the workshop on 27 November, which will run in London from 1000 – 1600. If by any chance you are unable to access this, email me at vicky.sargent@socitm.net.

We will be publishing the register of those interested in the community library.

Many thanks are due to Paul Canning for his work in getting this activity going, some of you will have been following his blogs on this topic in the CoP and elsewhere.

Possibly related posts:

• Four rules for councils’ democratic engagement
• Tim Davies on effective engagement
• The myth of engaging with everyone
• Google blogs to follow
• Socitm09

These days, the voice of diplomacy and democracy came from our leaders and governments.

Today, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “wind of change” that spread out from Eastern Europe and the Soviet World, Internet and New Technologies are empowering citizens’ voices and each of us to be a JFK making the call for freedom, equality and fraternity louder.

Today, the Internet is revolutionizing the way we do politics and diplomacy. President Obama, compared often to a 21st Century JFK, is not saying anymore “Yes, I can“, but “Yes, We Can“!

The “WE” has replaced the “I” in the age of Internet and politics.

What has been a “physical Wall” separating people yesterday has transformed to millions of “digital Walls” on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or blogs unifying people and transforming citizens and leaders in e-Diplomats.

Today, Twitter is celebrating the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” by setting up a “BerlinTwitterWall“, where each of us can leave our thoughts or wishes for the future.

Today, Iranian students or freedom fighters from all around the world can leave a message or a video on the digital walls of the Internet making what was once described as “The Wall of Shame” in our physical world obsolete.

Today, President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, opened a blog for more transparency and openness of what was 20 years ago the “Iron Curtain” of the Kremlin.

Today, on the Kremlin’s digital wall you can read:

“In the twenty-first century, our country once again needs to undergo comprehensive modernisation. This will be our first ever experience of modernisation based on democratic values and institutions. Instead of a primitive raw materials economy we will create a smart economy producing unique knowledge, new goods and technology of use to people.” (President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, blog).

Today, eDiplomacy and eParticipation is empowering us into Berliners of the world, where walls are no more synonyms of “divisions” and “shame“, but nods of “freedom of expressions“, “collective causes“, “dialogues“, “transparency“, “modernisation“, “exchange” and “collective knowledge sharing“.

In 1942, a famous French poet, Paul Eluard (1895-1952) wrote:

“On all pages read. On all white pages. Stone sand paper or ashes. I write your name: LIBERTY”. (Paul Eluard (1895-1952)).

Today, we are writing on the digital wall of Pep-Net (European eParticipation Network) about the 21st Century’s JFKs and Paul Eluards of the world empowered by the Internet and transforming the way we do politics and diplomacy.

Today, we can be all famous or anonymous JFKs and Paul Eluards and say:

“Wir sind alle Berliner!” (We are Berliners).

Daniel VAN LERBERGHE, POLITECH INSTITUTE (European Center of Political Technologies).

Above all scepticism of social media enthusiasm, there is really many things going on. Have you heard about, that OpenID biggest government boost is happening - according to Dana Blankenhorn, by the U.S. government endorsment of OpenID.

However, Malmö is a great city, with a lot of openness. The Garaget, a historical place for civil movements and an innovative social solution of the City, is offering the really warm role of being the host of this event: First Popular European Egovernment Conference, which is taking place in Malmö, paralell to the 5th Ministerial Conference on Egovernment - more in a Pecha Kucha / Unconference style, offering open spaces for discussion and agenda setting.

These events forerunner is the eGovernment Research and Innovation Conference , happening just right before these events.

Watching US NOW is good warmup. Do check it out, if you have not seen it.

It is obvious now I hope for everybody reading this blog, that the really intersting things are happening on two fronts. Most of us understands, that the open(source) community workers by hacking codes and fixing bugs are good citizens. Or more than good - they also share freely what they have back to the community. And those, who are going there and opening a space for discussion on the topic, they are partners for creating better governance. For now, the Swedish Minister, Mats Odell has confirmed his presence, according to the website of the Ministerial Conference thruogh Magnus Kolsjo’s tweet.

I wish, that the social and scientifical openness will meet with good cultre. Just as the Minister for Local Governments and Financial Market says on his site:

“I want to ditch the unwritten law that keeps us from standing out from the crowd and make way for the Ingvar Kamprads of tomorrow and other dynamic people - for a society that will harness your creativity and your potential, so as to benefit you and other people.”

Check out the conference twitter page here: http://twitter.dijksman.com/

and look for the hashtags #malmo09 and #egov2009

derived from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern-Europe-map2.svg

If you live in Central or Eastern Europe, we’re now in a position to help you get effective democracy and transparency websites built. mySociety have teamed up with the Open Society Institute (OSI) and together we are now looking for determined people with great ideas for new digital transparency and accountability services in their countries.

Over the next few months we are running a Call for Proposals, similar to the one we recently ran in the UK. The big difference is that this time we’re not looking for projects that we will build. We’re looking for projects you want to build, but that for lack of funds or lack of the right skills, you can’t get started yourself.

Each month the Open Society Institute and mySociety will work closely together to select a series of projects to fund and mentor. Crucially, the call isn’t solely for existing NGOs: the process is absolutely open to submissions from individuals or groups with no prior direct experience of working in the transparency and accountability sector, but who have a good idea that addresses a problem they see in their country. We will, however, look more favourably on applicants with access to the advanced programming skills required to build sites like this.

The criteria are simple, though demanding:

1. The projects have to generate some kind of meaningful transparency, accountability, or democratic empowerment of another kind.
2. The projects must seize the unique benefits that the Internet brings with it, such as scalability, two way communication, easy data analysis and so on.

More details are available over at our new CEE site, but even if you don’t live in one of the eligible countries please help us spread the word about this exciting new opportunity!

Statistics were recently released on the performance of UK central government departments with respect to their handling of freedom of information requests. The latest figures are for the second quarter of 2009. We have been able to use these to calculate the fraction of all requests which are made via mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com.

• 13.1% of all FOI requests to “Departments of State” in the second quarter of 2009 were made via WhatDoTheyKnow.com. In absolute terms this was 753 out of 5769 requests; this is up from 8.5% in the first quarter of 2009.
• 32.3% of FOI requests to the Home Office (which includes the UKBA and the IPS) were made via WhatDoTheyKnow in the second quarter of 2009. In absolute terms this was 206 out of 638 requests.
• The latest figures show that in twelve of the UK’s twenty-one Departments of State more than 10% of FOI requests were made via WhatDoTheyKnow.

What these statistics mean is that an ever increasing fraction of the information released in response to freedom of information requests is being archived and made publicly available by WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Hopefully this will reduce the number of duplicate requests being submitted and ensure the information released is made available to the widest possible audience which in-turn should increase the chances it is acted on.

Only forty-three central government bodies have their freedom of information performance monitored centrally. This is a tiny fraction of the three thousand or so bodies currently listed by WhatDoTheyKnow.

Raw Data

• Freedom of Information Act: statistics on implementation in central government – UK Ministry of Justice
• Detailed statistics on WhatDoTheyKnow’s share of requests on a per department basis.

We are very happy to announce that Duncan Parkes has joined mySociety, bringing our team of full time core developers up to four.

Duncan is the incredibly prolific author of screen scrapers for the lovely PlanningAlerts.com which he runs with Richard Pope.

He also has a PhD in Mathematics, which I expect you’ll want to read all of here, and is an editor of Open Source programming books with APress. During the vetting process he listed one of the passions of his life as being ‘Unit Testing‘, which, combined with his love of postbox crowdsourcing, made picking him more or less a no brainer.

In the short run we’ve let him loose, under the tutelage of Francis Irving, on the scaling challenges presented by Mapumental – I can’t wait to see what comes out of it.

On Saturday John Cross and Richard Taylor, two volunteers who work on mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com, gave a workshop on FOI to a meeting of activists from Republic, an organisation which campaigns for an elected head of state in the UK.

mySociety and WhatDoTheyKnow are non-partisan and don’t get involved in campaigning except in specific areas relating to openness and transparency. That said, members of the WhatDoTheyKnow team are be happy to consider invitations from any groups wishing to hold a workshop discussing freedom of information.

Many of those present at Saturday’s event were active campaigners on a wide range of subjects ranging from human rights to fair trade as well as having an interest in constitutional reform. The FOI workshop was oversubscribed with the majority of those present at the event deciding to attend the session. Unlike a previous workshop held at OpenTech where most attendees had made an FOI request themselves prior to the event, at this workshop all but one had not done so.

The Royals and FOI
Given the audience, the status of the royals with respect to FOI was particularly pertinent. The FOI act exempts information if it relates to: “communications with Her Majesty, with other members of the Royal Family or with the Royal Household, or the conferring by the Crown of any honour or dignity”. This exemption does not apply though if it is determined that it is in the public interest for the information to be released. The requirement for this public interest test is under threat as the Prime Minister has been moving to strengthen the restrictions on releasing information related to the Royal family. On the 10th of June 2009 in a speech to Parliament on Constitutional Renewal Gordon Brown said:

…we have considered the need to strengthen protection for particularly sensitive material, and there will be protection of royal family and Cabinet papers as part of strictly limited exemptions.

Following that speech BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum obtained a statement from the Ministry of Justice clarifying that in practice what Gordon Brown’s words meant was:

… the relevant exemption in the Freedom of Information Act will be made absolute for information relating to communications with the Royal Household that is less than 20 years’ old.

In FOI jargon an “absolute exemption” is one not subject to a public interest test.

Even with the law as it stands it is not easy to obtain information on how the royals are, or are attempting to, influence government. For example John Cross has asked the Ministry of Justice to supply him with copies of correspondence they had received from the Queen and Prince of Wales. They rejected his request on the grounds that the public interest in non-disclosure exceeded the public interested in disclosure; as well as suggesting exemptions relating to “information provided in confidence” and “personal information” also applied.

The Royal Household’s position on FOI
The Royal Household is not subject to the freedom of information act; though it has made a statement on the subject saying:

Despite its exemption from the FOI Acts, the Royal Household’s policy is to provide information as freely as possible in other areas, and to account openly for its use of public money.

WhatDoTheyKnow’s policy is to include such organisations which have indicated they are willing to voluntarily comply with the act to the site. While we list The Royal Household, at the time of writing no-one has yet used the facility to request information.

Using WhatDoTheyKnow for Campaigning
While we stress the importance of keeping freedom of information requests focused, FOI is a powerful tool for campaigners. We were asked if it would be possible for a group like Republic to set up an account on WhatDoTheyKnow for their campaign? The answer to this is: “Yes! – WhatDoTheyKnow wants to encourage groups to use the site”. The information commissioner has confirmed that it is acceptable to use the name of a “corporate body” when making a FOI request, that’s a broad term which encompasses many organisations, groups and charities.

Republic themselves use FOI extensively and often generate major national news stories as a result of responses to their requests. They want to be able to either offer journalists exclusive stories or write a press release based on information released. They can’t do this if the story gets out first via WhatDoTheyKnow so would be interested in an ability to make requests initially in private. mySociety and WhatDoTheyKnow have been considering an option for journalists to be able to make hidden requests via the site. Such a feature could potentially generate an income stream for the site as well as encourage a greater proportion of FOI requests to be made via it. Once the article had been published then the FOI correspondence could be opened up to the public providing access to the source material backing up the story.

As well as meeting those who use, or might want to use, the site to make requests WhatDoTheyKnow also wants to engage positively with public authorities; we see them as important users of our service too. Developer Francis Irving represented the site at the FOI Live conference for information professionals in June and will be speaking at the Freedom of Information Scotland conference in December.

Current Birmingham parliamentary boundaries

Birmingham parliamentary boundaries at the next election

Parliamentary boundary changes appear to be a source of confusion to many people and organisations. The facts are quite simple – parliamentary boundary changes, proposed by the various Boundary Commissions, do not take effect until the next general election. Until then, your MP remains whoever they have been, no matter what literature you may get through your letter box, or what anyone may tell you.

As one example, take Birmingham City Council. Their page on constituencies and wards correctly states that Birmingham is divided into eleven parliamentary constituencies, but then goes on to list only ten – they are listing the new constituencies which do not yet exist, as Birmingham is losing one constituency at the next election. It appears that they have organised themselves along the new boundaries in advance – which is fine, but this doesn’t affect current Parliamentary representation, and so they should explain this clearly, as otherwise members of the public get confused (and blame us for giving them the “wrong” MP, when we haven’t done so). As you can see from the maps above (which highlight Birmingham, Hall Green), the constituencies will be changing their boundaries quite a bit, and we have had reports of people receiving letters from candidates in the next election who are MPs of different neighbouring constituencies, simply referring to themselves as an MP, which is a great source of confusion.

St Josephs Avenue is just below the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital

An inhabitant of St Josephs Avenue, Birmingham (behind the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital), which is currently within the Selly Oak parliamentary constituency (red), and the Northfield ward of Birmingham City Council (green), would, on looking at Birmingham City Council’s website, assume they’re in a parliamentary constituency called Northfield. Northfield is currently the constituency to the west of Selly Oak; at the next election, its boundary with Selly Oak will change to the blue line, at which point St Josephs Avenue will be in the Northfield constituency. But not until then.

Map of Streatham constituency at next election

Current Streatham parliamentary boundary

As another example (chosen purely as it has come up in user support), the Labour candidate for Streatham has a page about the constituency – obviously you would expect a candidate to be talking about the future constituency, but would it hurt to add some explanation that Streatham is currently a slightly different shape?

Boundaries of different things are all independent – if a ward boundary moves due to some local issue, the corresponding Parliamentary boundary does not necessarily change with it (probably not, in fact). So when Birmingham changed its ward boundaries back in 2003, they became out of sync with the Parliamentary constituencies. From the next election, things will be more in sync as the new Parliamentary boundaries are based on more recent ward boundaries, but this will again separate over time. All we can do is always clearly explain the current situation, and ask that others do the same.

Image from jaygoldman

Note: This post is a work in progress, I need your help to improve it, especially with knowledge of non-English sites

I was recently in Washington DC catching up with mySociety’s soul-mates at the Sunlight Foundation. As we talked about what was going on in the field of internet-enabled transparency, it came clear to me that there are now more identifiable categories of transparency website than there used to be.

Identifying and categorising these types of site turns out to be surprisingly useful. First, it can help people ask “Why don’t we have anyone doing that in our country?” Second, it can help mySociety to make sure that when we’re planning ahead we don’t fail to consider certain options that be currently off our radar. Also, it gives me an excuse to tell you about some sites that you may not have seen before.

Anyway, enough preamble. Here they are as I see them – please give me more suggestions as you find them. As you can see there’s a lot more activity in some fields than others.

1. Transparency blogs & newspapers – At the technically simplest, but most manual labour-intensive end of the scale is sites, commercial and volunteer driven, whose owners use transparency to help them to write stories. Given almost every political blog does this a bit, it can be hard to name specific examples, but I will note that Heather Brooke is the UK’s pre-eminent FOI-toting journalist/blogger, and we’ve just opened a blog for our awesome volunteers on WhatDoTheyKnow to show their FOI skills to an as-yet unsuspecting public.

2. What Politicians do in their parliaments – These sites primarily include lists of politicians, and information about their primary activities in their assemblies, such as voting or speaking. This encompasses mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com, Rob McKinnon’s one man labour of love TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, Italy’s uber-deep OpenPolis.it (6 layers of government, anyone?), Germany’s almost-un-typable Abgeordnetenwatch, Romania’s writ-wielding IPP.ro, Josh Tauberer’sGovTrack.us, plus the bonny bouncing babies OpenAustralia and Kildare Street (Ireland). Of special note here are Mzalendo (Kenya) who unlike everyone else, can’t reply on access to a parliamentary website to scrape raw data from, and Julian Todd’s UNDemocracy (International), that has to fight incredible technical barriers to get the information out.

3. Databases of questions and answers posed to politicians – These sites let people post politicians questions, and the publish the questions and answers. The Germans running Abgeordnetenwatch (Parliament Watch) seem to have had considerable success here, with newspapers citing what politicians say on their site. Yoosk has some politicians in the UK on it, too.

4. Money in politics – This comes in two forms, money given to candidates (MAPlight), and money bunged by politicians to their favourite causes (Earmark watch). In the UK, as far as I know, the Electoral Commission’s database remains currently unscraped, perhaps because the data is so ungranular.

5. Government spending – where the big money goes. In the US the dominant site is FedSpending.org, and in the UK we have ukpublicspending.co.uk.

6. Websites containing bills going through parliament, or the law as voted on – This includes the increasingly substantial OpenCongress in the US which saw major traffic during the Health Care debates, and the UK government’s own Acts database and Statute Law Database. Much of the legal database field, however, remains essentially private.

7. Services that create transparency as a side effect of delivering services – Our own sites lead the way here: FixMyStreet’s public problem reports and WhatDoTheyKnow’s FOI archive are both created by people who aren’t primarily using the site to enrich it – they’re using it to get some other service.

8. Election websites – These come in many forms, but what they have in common is their desire to shed light on the positions and histories of candidates, whether incumbents or new comers. The biggest beast here is Stemwijzer (Netherlands), probably in relative terms the most used transparency or democracy site ever. However these sites are popular in several places, the big but highly labour intensive VoteSmart (US), Smartvote.ch (Switzerland), plus others. mySociety is shortly to start to recruit constituency volunteers to help with our take on this problem, keep an eye on this blog if you want to know more.

9. Political document archives - This is a new category, now occupied by Sunlight’s Partytime archive for invitation to political events, and TheStraightChoice, Julian Todd and Richard Pope’s wonderful new initiative for archiving election leaflets and other paper propoganda.

10. Bulk data - Online transparency pioneer Carl Malamud doesn’t do sites, he does data. Big globs zipped up and made publicly available for coders and researchers to download and process. The US government has now stepped into this field itself with Data.gov, doubtless soon to be followed by data.gov.uk.

——

Please don’t shoot me if I’ve missed anything here, the world is a big place. But I thought that was a useful and interesting exercise, and I hope you’ll both find it useful, and help me improve it too. Comment away.

This week, Paul Clark MP (Gillingham, also Minister for Transport) announced, on Twitter no less, that he was working on “[his] version of FixMyStreet”, and requested feedback about the site.

There are numerous things here to be applauded, not least that an MP is using several new media channels to engage in conversation with his constituents. However, the same question as before comes to mind – is this site going to do anything new, or anything better, than the mySociety site that it replicates?

Perhaps it will target a wider range of reports than FixMyStreet; perhaps users will feel more comfortable using the familiar Google Maps, if that’s what the developers plump for; time will tell.

For what it’s worth, I can’t escape the feeling that a prominent link to FixMyStreet – like the one to the left – would fulfill the needs of both the provider and the users of PaulClarkMP.co.uk, and would take a tiny fraction of the time to implement, but I look forward to being proved wrong.

Still, at least Mr Clark cites FixMyStreet as the example he’s trying to emulate, rather than Medway Council’s own website. Here’s their form for reporting graffiti. Brace yourself, it’s not pretty.

Go straight to the 2009 Call for Proposals

Do you have a ‘mySocietyish’ idea that you’d like to see become reality? Is there something radical about the sites we already run that should change? Do you have any smart ideas about helping more people to benefit from the services we already offer? Or would you just like to read and comment on ideas submitted by other people?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we’d like you to submit your idea to our 2009 Call for Proposals (built for us by Richard Pope). We’ve run these twice before in 2003 and 2006, resulting in the launch and success of sites such as WriteToThem and WhatDoTheyKnow.

Just as on previous occasions we’ll pick a winner and some runners up, but also just as before we can only promise to do our best – we don’t have the resources to solemnly promise to build the winner, whatever it might be.

What We’re Looking For (or, an insight into the mySociety mindset)

The characteristics of the winning and runner up ideas are highly likely to include one or more of the following factors. Don’t try and include all of them, that’d be silly :)

1. They have to involve the Internet. We don’t do clay modelling.
2. They will capitalise on one or more things that the Internet does really well, better than offline or other forms. WhatDoTheyKnow, for example, seizes on the fact that email can be simultaneously published and rerouted – a simple but critical insight.
3. They will either be a whole new website idea, or a smart and impactful modification of something we already do.
4. They will be ideas that have clear social, civic or democratic benefits that are really easy to explain to the least political person you know, even if the technology behind them is fiendishly complicated.
5. They will have some characteristic that will widely spread the word that the service exists, or that other mySociety services exist.
6. They will offer brilliant value for money, even if they’re expensive to build in the first instance.
7. They will be genuinely new ideas
8. They won’t contain the phrase ’social media’

We might well change these guidelines a bit as the first responses come in. The call will stay open until September 15th, and we’ll hope to announce the winners in early October.

So what are you waiting for – check out the 2009 Call for Proposals

It is with overwhelming sadness that I write to tell our community that Angie Martin, mySociety’s fourth core developer, has died. She was taken from us by the cancer that she had been fighting since soon after we hired her less than two years ago.

Possessed of an almost unbelievably upbeat personality, Angie brought not only her formidable Perl skills, but her blazing warmth of character to our team. In remission during our yearly retreat in January this year, she combined laughter with a typically tough line of questioning on ideas she thought insufficiently robust. With typical disgregard for cool, her CV noted that she was “known to enjoy wrangling regular expressions on a Sunday Morning”. She didn’t see any contradiction between being a successful woman and a geek, throwing herself wholeheartedly into the Mac-toting, perlmonger ethos. She even brought her husband Tommy with her, who became a significant volunteer.

Given her habit of plain speaking, it is pointless to pretend that Angie was able to make the contribution to mySociety’s users or codebase that she wanted to. What she achieved in terms of difficult coding during recovery from chemotherapy was incredible, breathtaking – but she wanted to change the world. It now falls to the rest of us, and our supporters, to live up to the expectations she embodied, to continue to push every day, using skills like those that she had to help people with everyday problems. We now have to ask ‘What would Angie do?’, as well as ‘What would Chris do?’. It is a lot to live up to.

She was a mySociety core developer: I hope that meant as much to her as it meant for me to have her as one of my coders. Remember and Respect.

Updated: Angie changed her surname upon getting married, a couple of months ago. I have just read she wanted to be remembered as Angie Martin, and so I have made that change. Read this tribute on the Lasso list.

Updated 21 7 2009: Tommy has just told me that those wishing to may memorial donations should send them to Hospice at Home.

They found that in the first quarter of 2009, 8.5% of all requests made to central government departments were made using WhatDoTheyKnow. In absolute terms that was 514 of 6019 requests.

The breakdown by department is given in the below table. Notably, one in five FOI requests to the Home Office (122 of 643) were made via WhatDoTheyKnow.

WDTK = WhatDoTheyKnow; Source for total FOI request statistics : Statistics for Q1 2009 (released on the 25th of June 2009); Extended table covering all monitored bodies available.

The Ministry of Justice only monitors, and provides statistics on, 44 bodies’ compliance with the Freedom of Information Act; WhatDoTheyKnow currently lists 2910. We cover a wide range of local bodies including Primary Care Trusts, Local Councils and the Police. There is no national monitoring of how many FOI requests are made to such bodies, or how well they perform when responding to requests.

If you want to see such performance statistics, please help categorise more of the responses made via the site. It can be quite addictive!

Thanks to Richard Taylor for doing this research – see his blog post for some more details, including some information about Scotland.