L’OPSI promeut l’accès à l’information publique
Source Kablenet, 29 /07/2008
http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/FrontpageRSS/48AED1455D49C83680257495004C1CF2!OpenDocument
L’Office pour l’information
du secteur public ( Office
of Public Sector Information equivalent britannique de l’Office des Publications au
niveau de l’Union européenne a ouvert récemment un service expérimental (beta)
invitant les citoyens à demander l’accès à des documents officiels ou à
améliorer l’accès à ces derniers.
Voir (en langue
anglaise) http://www.opsi.gov.uk/unlocking-service/Request/
L’exemple ci-dessous
émane demande un meilleur accès aux processus législatif
Voir aussi
http://europa-eu-audience.typepad.com/fr/2008/07/les-institution.html
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/electronicrecords/
Un exemple de requête: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/unlocking-service/CategoryView/category/Bills/
Public Sector Information Holder: UK
Parliament
Information Asset: Bills
The
problem
The way bills are currently published makes it excessively difficult for people/organizations to provide:
(i) email alerts where a bill mentions
something of interest
(ii) information about which amendments an MP has voted for
(iii) allow people who understand bills to annotate them
(iv) many other useful services
In short, the way bills are published makes it more difficult for campaigning groups and charities to bridge the gap between the people who pass the laws and everyone else.
My
ideal solution
The bills should be published as structured data. This is relatively easy and inexpensive but once it is done people and organisations can start the real work of building useful applications.
One such organisation MySociety has already gone as far as setting out how the data could be structured and has estimated the initial cost to be around £10,000. They have also estimated that no more than one full-time employee would be needed (while Parliament is in session) to published the bills in a structured form.
See technical details suggested by MySociety
here: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills/techy
What
I would do
I am not a software programmer so if the data was published I would have to wait for organisations like MySociety or Friends of the Earth or Unlock Democracy to build applications that I could use to:
sign up to email alerts to find out
about things I care about
find out how my MP was voting on
bills/amendments
find out what amendments actually mean
lobby my MP to vote for/against
Public Sector Information
Holder: Office of Public Sector Information
Information Asset: London Gazette Supplements
The problem
Notices & Supplements
are not available in any machine readable format. They contain a wide range of
extremely useful information about the activities of government and business.
My ideal solution
I would suggest two
improvements that should run alongside each other:
- A REST API to query the existing database of notices and supplements. Data should be returned in XML or some equivalently useful format, and the API should be able to perform text searches, limit results by date or the type of notice/supplement, etc.
- An Atom feed for new notices. The system should provide a "see everything" feed as well as allowing users to specify what they'd like to see more narrowly, along the same lines as the database search API. This is essentially the same as the API, but provides 'live' access to the latest information in the gazette, rather than a search for its back catalogue.
What I would do
This is a rich dataset that
provides many opportunities for innovation. One could use the information to
monitor for the registration of company names of interest and to be notified of
corporate insolvencies. Notifications of upcoming major roadworks could be
overlaid onto a map, as could applications to discharge fluids into national
waterways.Various notifications of applications for planning are published in
the Gazette, which could be of great interest to those affected by them, and
could be worked into services such as PlanningAlerts.com.
There is such a wide
variety of data in this dataset that the possibilities are limited only by
imagination.
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