Mash the State

Over on Liberal Conspiracy, Adrian Short announces Mash the State, a new campaign to get governmental information available in accessible formats - RSS feeds from councils are the first example of what the campaign will seek, and you can ask your local council to provide one here. Citizens could then track, aggregate and disseminate this data in a variety of forms known as 'mashups' in internet jargon - hence the name of the campaign. A natural venue for these mashups would be community news sites of the sort that are beginning to sprout up in the States, some of which provide this very service.One modest example of what this might allow would be a service alerting residents to applications for planning permission in their neighbourhood and providing a forum in which they could discuss them. Some councils may already list these applications on their websites, but for obvious reasons few provide open comment threads or draw too much attention to them. (Readers of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy will recall Arthur Dent being told that the proposal to build a bypass over his house was available in the planning office - in a locked filing cabinet located in a disused lavatory in the basement with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.)The technology required to make a wide array of governmental information accessible in this way is readily available, and Short observes that in most cases someone who knows what they are doing could set it up in half a day (although in fairness getting everyone involved to use the new system enter relevant information may take considerably longer - and there is always the danger that some public bodies will lack anyone who does know what they are doing, and hence pay consultants some absurd sum for the job). The difficulty, of course, will come in convincing those in charge to release information that could be used to hold them to account.