But I'm convinced this is the direction democracy should be going in - transparent communication of as much government data as possible, in open formats, and allow external groups to use that data to provide accountability, new services, whatever is needed. And conversely, the government needs to start taking seriously the problems of collecting masses of personal data and think about how to design systems that are more opt-in for data-sharing, while allowing criminal investigations to take place with appropriate authorisation.
Anyway, there were loads of interesting talks - from the journalist who did all the FoI legwork to get MPs expenses into the public domain, to an interesting session on using Open Source software in schools (particularly relevant to me as school governor, currently looking at rebuilding a school website), to the extremely disturbing talk on Intercept Modernization from ORG and No2ID, which was preceded by this wonderfully deadpan introduction by Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom:
Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom: "Three Pillars of Digital Britain", OpenTech 2009 from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
(there are some more videos on that site too from Bill Thompson, and Ben Goldacre - both worth a look).After the conference, I went out with my old friend Kath, and we had several pints of what turned out to be very strong lager (or maybe I'm just not used to drinking so much lately) so it was a good evening, but I was not feeling at my best by the time I got on the train back to Cambridge.
