Francis Irving

GISTEMP is a crucial open data set, because it contains the historical global temperature record. Not very important right now, but in the medium term absolutely vital for the continuing…

Writing in Times Online in April 2006 the eminent Professor Richard Susskind, legal tech guru and adviser to the great and good, spelt out his vision for a “Wikipedia of…

Free Our Bills! is a campaign led by a cheeky platypus, just escaping from the portcullis of Parliament. Sign up now, or read on… Sometimes data being free isn’t good…

Hot off the press – the UK’s Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has published a review of the economics of trading funds. The review follows (I think) recommendation…

In a speech today, the Leader of the Opposition in the UK said some interesting things about freeing up Government information. He begins with some general open information philosophy: But…

Sometimes you find some data whose lack of freedom is totally mysterious from a commercial point of view. At mySociety, we recently released made some travel time maps which help…

My last post here, Google vs. Facebook, was about how our own personal knowledge, that you’ve put into social networks like Facebook or MySpace, should also be open. By this…

Facebook has striken fear not only into the hearts of incumbent dot-com billionaires, but also into the hearts of open data freaks. It’s terrifying me – not least, because I…

There’s a buzz at GUADEC, an open source computer desktop conference in Birmingham right now, about the idea of the Online Desktop. Increasingly we all use web services rather than…

Yesterday, the UK’s Cabinet Office published an important new review of Public Sector Information. It’s a fat document to read through, but it oozes with ideas and stories (many no…