2009

So what do we need to know about a parliamentary bill? First of all, as soon as a piece of legislation is published, it has certain meta-data. Date originated; originating department; originating MP; originating house; type – primary legislation, order in council, statutory instrument; current status (pre-legislative/Green/White Paper, first reading, committee, report, second, third, Royal…

Read More free our bills: hardcore wonk/geek out

OpenTech blogging…after this morning’s MySociety brainstorm on the specifications for MPs’ expenses and tracking bills through Parliament, I’m concerned that we’re going to end up with the best imaginable system for monitoring public employees’ expenses, and miss some absolute horror of a thing while our attention is elsewhere. (Is that the latent content of Heather…

Read More a package manager for Westminster 1.4

OK, so the Iranian police – well, the Basij, the IRGC, the spooks, the cops, the repressive state apparatus anyway – are publishing photos of demonstrators on the Web and trying to crowdsource the job of identifying the faces on their CCTV tapes. It says here. And, indeed, here they are. Now, this is obviously…

Read More stars of CCTV

It’s the kind of day on the Holloway Road that rappers get mawkish about. So, obviously, time for some blogging about open-source software for the public sector. I’m hugely impressed by the contestants in the SourceForge Community Contest, specifically the ones in the Government category. There’s Trisano, a free epidemic surveillance system for public health…

Read More irrigating Senegal with free software

Another On Roads thing is the special role of the North; indeed, as he points out, it’s the construction of the M62 that made the North of England a sensible geographical construct rather than an awkward stereotype that uneasily combined Lancashire and Yorkshire. And so much early motorway building started up north; you have the…

Read More yet more roads

After the Mancunian love-in at Jamie Kenny’s, my own thoughts on Joe Moran’s On Roads are inevitably coming. I didn’t know that we have Tony Benn to thank for the big-box supply chain logistics industry. But yes; at the end of the 1960s, the then Minister of Technology tore off a £150,000 innovation grant for…

Read More slip inside this (giant distribution ware)house