Some more remarkable achievements by the Showusabetterway website - the competition set up by the UK government asking people to suggest ways to use its data to create mashups and new services, and offering a £20,000 prize for a winner. (Or possibly winners. But read on.)

The latest win: the Royal Mail is joining in, offering its Postcode Address File. Yes, you can argue that it ought to make that available for free anyway, but let’s change the world one piece at a time.

To get the full file, all you need to do - as the site explains - is to email the Royal Mail.

For full access you should email the Address Management Unit at address.management@royalmail.com Put ‘Show Us A Better Way’ in your subject heading so they know to prioritise your request.

Please also in the email say (a) the format you’d like it in (given on the details page) and your physical address, so they can send you the data on CD if you want it.

(The link above will fill in the email with the subject line pre-filled.)

This is a hell of an achievement. As I understand it, the licences will only be valid through to the end of July, so be quick. But if you’ve ever needed to see what the full PAF looks like, here’s your chance.

Obviously, we would not condone using it in ways that breach the Royal Mail licence. We’re aiming to do this legally. But it’s definitely another success for the Power of Information taskforce and Tom Watson in the Cabinet Office. He said he’d have a go on June 29th; now he’s achieved it. Three weeks? For government and licensing regimes, that’s fast.

This morning’s Guardian has as its third “leader” (the opinion slot where the paper points to issues of the day), which is always “in praise of…”.

And today it’s In praise of “Free Our Data”. Hey, we’re chuffed.

The piece itself says (in part)

Businesses and others could use the data to map cheaply where crimes happen, or how much traffic is on the roads. Enthusiasts for cliff-climbing could share tidal forecasts. Those against argue that the Ordnance Survey’s work is not entirely paid for by taxpayers, or warn that it could lead to the privatisation of all data collection. These are serious points, and they should be taken into account. But the momentum is in favour of freeing up data; Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson boasts that he wakes up and immediately thinks “How can I free another dataset?” One hopes that is not literally true, but the sentiment is appreciated.

I don’t know, I like the idea of Tom Watson getting up having thought about a new dataset to make available. Heaven knows there are plenty of them.

But please go to the site and join in on the comments, which includes one with some interesting points about the British Library. (I’m not certain of the funding status of the BL, so don’t know if it would fall under the FOD umbrella or not.) Opinions? I lean towards the idea that the BL’s manuscripts are pre-existing data, and so there has to be some sort of cost involved in getting them into digital form…

Today in the Guardian’s Technology section Heather Brooke - who was one of the key drivers behind getting access to MP’s expenses - writes (as part of the Free Our Data campaign) in Met keeps crime stats under lock and key about how the Metropolitan Police insist that (a) they’re not going to release data for crime mapping (b) even if they did, they keep it amalgamated on such a level that it wouldn’t be any use to anyone.

The Met also cites privacy as a reason not to release location specific crime data. Yet the Data Protection Act does not prohibit personal information being disclosed, even if one considers anonymised crime reports “personal”; and Boris Johnson’s pledge was only ever to publish crime data by street level, not by exact address. The law’s purpose is to ensure that disclosure is for a legitimate purpose. State-mandated ignorance benefits no one.

Crimes are not a great secret, particularly not violent crimes - such as the spate of stabbings in the UK in recent months - though without access to the raw data, how can we know how and where it’s rising? [Richard] Pope [of planningalerts.com] thinks the main problem is that the police are not technically savvy, citing an encounter at a meeting between locals, the council and the police where the Met admitted it couldn’t provide incident detail broken down by area - so the council ended up paying the Met just to get this information.

But people aren’t necessarily waiting for the police. Take this mashup generated by MapMan which looks at that topic du jour, knife crime.

Via the Digital Urban blog, here’s London Teenage Murders 2007, Knife Assaults and Regeneration Areas: Mapped - A Clear Pattern Emerges:

Created using Google MyMaps the list has been compiled via various websites (such as http://www.capitalradio.co.uk/article.asp?id=532062) with street names identified in related press articles and plotted on the map. Actual position within the street will not be accurate, but the street names themselves should be. Note the map relates to all murders, not just knife related incidents.

Using MapTube [URL corrected] the map can be overlaid with other data sets, such as a map uploaded detailing assault using a knife or sharp objects extracted from all hospital admissions (2007). The map is based on data with a cause code of ICD-10 X99 (assault by sharp object) and excludes all codes that may indicate accidental injury (ICD10 – W25, W26), self inflicted (ICD10 – X78) and undetermined intent (ICD10 Y28).

Figures are directly age standardised per 100,000 population with CI’s - Actual counts were excluded in the map due to disclosure surrounding low numbers. By overlaying the two maps you begin to get a picture of the extent of knife crime and the number of murders in London.

Each link is clickable for more information. Such data should really be available via either the http://www.london.gov.uk/ or http://www.met.police.uk/ along with other locations of crime in the city. It may be alarming to see such incidents mapped but this is the city we live in and the public should have a right to view exact locations of crime in their neighbourhoods.

There’s plenty more: they then overlay urban deprivation and find an interesting correlation with the number of teenage murders.

OK, so you might find that obvious. But it also tells you where the energies need to be focussed - and whether parents in Hampstead or Notting Hill really need to worry about the possibility of their child being a victim.

(One other thing: the gender of the victims. I suspect it’s overwhelmingly male too, isn’t it?)

Anyhow, this is all stuff that’s been done at zero cost to the police. Maybe if they think they’re overcome with data, we could help them out some more. Make the data available for free, and we’ll help you for free.

(crossposted with the Guardian Technology blog)

How interesting: we note from the EPSIPlus blog (a bit late - since the job application has long since closed, so if you were wanting to do this, you’ve missed the boat) that Ordnance Survey is seeking a non-executive chair.

How intriguing. I think I’m right in saying that none of the other trading funds is chaired; and as the advert itself says, “It is within the plan to modernise the governance of Ordnance Survey; as a result Ordnance Survey are seeking to appoint the first Non-executive Chair in the organisations’ [sic] 217-year history.”

We hear that the appointee will probably be chosen sometime this month.

So what sort of person are they looking for?

The ideal candidate will be an experienced Chair who understands how to build commercial opportunities in the public sector and who has the intellect to take forward a challenging debate about Ordnance Survey’s future strategy. S/he will have experience of change.

Of change? Change, at OS? Why? How utterly fascinating.

The ad itself (click for larger version) says the role requires that they “develop and champion a clear and compelling strategy to a broad range of stakeholders; ensure the board is effective in delivering a strategy balancing the nation’s interest with commercial imperatives [emphasis added - CA]; scrutinise performance and governance structures in line with owner’s objectives. Evaluate board skills mix and performance.”

As if that wasn’t interesting enough..

Here are the “key responsibilities” laid out in the document:

The key responsibilities are to:

• Ensure that the Board as a whole is effective in developing a strategy and corporate business plans for Ordnance Survey, scrutinising its performance against the endorsed plans and acting in the best interests of the Department for Communities and Local Government as shareholder, while balancing the need for Ordnance Survey to act in the nation’s interest within in a commercially competitive environment;
• Ensure that the shareholder receives full and timely feedback on the organisation’s business performance, its progress against plans, the future development of the Corporate Plan, and any other issues requiring attention;
• Ensure the maintenance of an effective board, with an appropriate balance of skills and experience, including key appointments as required. The Chair will be part of the selection panel for the recruitment of any new Chief Executive and Non-executive Directors;
• Ensure appropriate governance arrangements are established and implemented in line with best practice and the requirements of a public body;
• Actively contribute to the management of relationships with Ordnance Survey’s stakeholders both in Whitehall, the devolved administrations and beyond, and represent Ordnance Survey as appropriate with customers and industry players;
• Acts as a source of advice and support on business issues to the Chief Executive and other Executives as necessary.
• The Chair is responsible for upholding good governance at Ordnance Survey. S/he will ensure appropriate and effective Board sub-committees exist and will, in consultation with the Chief Executive, determine Board meeting frequency and agenda. A key role is to ensure that all Non-executive Directors are effective in the support and challenge they provide to the Executive team.

The Shareholder Executive, working for the Department for Communities and Local Government, takes a close interest in the performance management of Ordnance Survey. The Chair is expected to work constructively with senior Shareholder Executive officials.

The candidate is expected to have the usual abilities concomitant with these jobs - bulging address book, Cabinet ministers and heads of industry mobile numbers on speed dial, ability to leap tall buildings and to cure sick animals with their magic touch, that sort of thing.

On its face, it doesn’t look like the successful candidate will die from overwork: three or four days a month, which earns an annual remuneration of £40,000 - £50,000. But of course that would be to ignore how important this job will be. We’re looking forward to seeing who it is.

Obviously, if you’ve applied, do feel free to share the experience..

Tom Watson MP, the Cabinet Office minister who is also the political wing of the Power Of Information taskforce, started an interesting debate on his blog, when he noted a comment by Simon Dickson about the usefulness of the Postcode Address File.

He mused, “I’m going to spend some time trying to understand just why [PAF] can’t be available for free or at marginal cost. Feel free to air your views in the comment section.”

And boy, did people air their comments. It’s worth reading in full, but I think the prize - at least the Free Our Data prize for stating the value of the free data model - goes to Greg, who (in a long and well-argued comment) sums up by responding to “Mitch” (an earlier commenter who had worked in the Royal Mail on updating the PAF):

The points you make, Mitch, are unfortunately so reminisecent of the innovation-stifling opinions of inward-facing bureaucrats which have been such a major contributor to Britain’s loss of economic advantage over the years. Examples which are now so clear include the fact that we invented public-key encryption long before the US, but kept it a government secret rather than using it to gain an edge in commerce; or that Frank Whittle invented the jet engine only to find that closed-minded bureaucrats couldn’t see it working. Bureaucrats are rarely the best people to judge whether something has a place in propelling innovation and competitiveness. The fact that there’s so much energy on my side of the postcodes debate [arguing to make it available for free] says it all.

Mitch; you should be proud that you worked on a world-leading data source. It’s just such a shame its wings are crippled by its owners.

We love it when people state the benefits so clearly. The whole thread is worth reading, though, for the vigour of the arguments on both sides.

The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) goes from strength to strength. After its chief Carol Tullo spoke out in Europe about the importance of greater access to data, OPSI has set up a web page where you can request data sets you want released:

As the regulator for public sector information re-use, we know that people can encounter problems from time to time getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. Difficulties can include problems with charging, licensing or the data standards that public sector information is provided in.

These problems aren’t about access (which is dealt with under Freedom of Information legislation), but all the other issues which can occur when you want to do something with public sector information - copy it, remix it with other data or add value and republish it. If you are trying to re-use some public sector information, but the data you need is locked-up, this service is for you.

How it works:

1. You describe the public sector information asset you want unlocked for re-use, and post a request to the service. We’ll check through your request and if it’s OK (e.g. not a Freedom of Information request) we’ll post it here.
2. Others can see your request and support it, either by adding a comment or by voting. The more support a request has, the better the chances of unlocking the information you want to re-use.
3. We’ll contact the public sector information holder and see what can be done to unlock the information for re-use. To keep things simple, if the problem relates to an issue specifically covered by the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations or the Information Fair Trader Scheme, we’ll treat it accordingly - so you won’t need to make a separate complaint. We’ll post back our findings here.

And there’s already one request in there, for access to OS electoral boundary details, which I recall is an issue that comes up again and again - it was certainly mentioned at the RSA/Free Our Data debate nearly two years ago.

The problem, as detailed by “Matthew”:

I find it odd that if I want to know the actual boundary of the ward or constituency I am in (co-ordinates, not just an image), I have to pay Ordnance Survey lots of money for their Boundary-Line product. I would have thought that, given it’s quite important to know which MP or councillors I’m going to have the option of electing, that this information should be freely available as part of a healthy democracy; it’s compiled by the various publicly funded Boundary Commissions/Committees as far as I know.

His ideal solution:

I think the actual data rather than just images of the boundaries should be available, so that people can create things using the data - you can’t do anything with images besides display them. For example, I can’t create a Google map (using their My Maps feature) of my ward marking on where and when councillors hold their surgeries, and other local amenities. I can’t create an application that asks people to select where they live on a map and it tell them if their Parliamentary constituency will be changing at the next general election, what it’s changing to, and what difference that makes to them.

I am aware of the election-maps.co.uk website, but this is extremely hard to use - you have to know the name of your area before you can enter a postcode, you can’t look up by e.g. ward name, and it only provides images of the boundaries.

More power to his, and OPSI’s, elbow.

This is all terrifically encouraging, especially along with the Show Us A Better Way competition using government data for imaginative (and perhaps commercial) mashups. Have you got your entry in yet?

As part of the government’s Show Us A Better Way competition, it has made available all sorts of databases and datasets and APIs that haven’t previously been available - such as the list of all the schools in England and Wales.

Our only quibble with the latter was that it was only provided in Excel format - which as one commenter points out is a proprietary format (though free programs like OpenOffice will open it), and anyway to really begin doing useful things with such data you need to stuff it into a database; which calls for SQL format.

Never fear, Free Our Data is here. We’ve imported the data from the Excel file into a MySQL database and exported it as an SQL file which has all the required CREATE TABLE commands, with the data.

Grab a copy.
To make sure you’ve got the correct version (in case it gets copied and used elsewhere):

the MD5 checksum of the zip file is 3f46d71d84f6047ee0162d12a9456901

and of the SQL file itself (once unzipped) is 1021643b2c1c71773f20c7a4fbd1b8e1 .

As an idea, Free Our Data has now begun to gain some traction in government - and even, as the whole saga over crime mapping in London shows, with the Conservatives.

Now the Power Of Information taskforce, which includes Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister we interviewed a while back, has started a new initiative (though competition is just as good a word) at Showusabetterway.com:

Ever been frustrated that you can’t find out something that ought to be easy to find? Ever been baffled by league tables or ‘performance indicators’? Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large?

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.

And in case you wondered if it involves puttings CDs from HMRC into envelopes..

Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.

There is a set of examples - such as crime mapping, Fixmystreet, and a pointer to others such as farmsubsidy.org (which “compiles obscure information about subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy and puts it in one place, to make it much easier to see where farm subsidies are going across Europe.”)

The team signs off with a flourish:

We’re confident that you’ll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don’t have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.

There’s already a list of submitted ideas, which includes a Road Works API, FixMyTransport (”where people with shared public transport problems could come together to get things improved”), Rate My Bus, and others.

Come on, people - tell us your ideas, then go and enter them on the site (or vice versa) and win the funding. It would be fantastic if a Guardian Tech reader could win this.

Update: just to point to some of the resources you can use (among many, many, many): mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS, neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). And these are in API form, which means they’re all ready for mashup goodness.

Although not, it seems, the Postcode Address File (though the Edubase file, with school addresses, does include postcodes).

You may have heard of Heather Brooke: she’s one of the campaigners who got MPs’ expenses and spending put into the public eye through the Freedom of Information Act and a great deal of determination.

Now she’s written a terrific article for The Times about crime mapping, and why it’s needed:

The police in Britain, however, feel they “own” crime data and the public have no right to know what is happening. Yet access to criminal incident data is vital, as it allows the public to judge the effectiveness of the police and crime policies. In a void of ignorance, a politician or police chief can claim anything he likes about crime: that binge drinking is endemic or under control, that muggings are increasing or falling, that policing is working or failing.

The police can also hide their failings. Northumbria police claimed that only three crimes of note had occurred one weekend in May, yet a freedom of information request revealed that, in fact, there were more than 1,000 incidents, 161 of them violent.

As she points out…

Shamefully, the Information Commissioner has objected to the plan of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, to allow people to know what crime happens in their street, arguing that it would breach the privacy of the victims of crime. But the Data Protection Act does not prohibit personal information being disclosed. Its purpose is to ensure that such disclosure is for a legitimate purpose.

Yet again a policy that would be of great public benefit is being blocked by an unthinking, fetishistic attitude towards privacy. A balance can easily be struck between the privacy of those reporting crimes and the overall safety of citizens. The only people made safer by the current policy of wilfully enforced ignorance are poorly performing police chiefs.

That “fetishistic” sums it up perfectly. Just as “health and safety” has become the refrain for anyone trying to stop someone else doing something in the physical world, so “privacy” has become something that is used to block anything that might disrupt the status quo.

But disrupting the status quo is what Brooke, and indeed the Free Our Data campaign, are all about. It’s difficult, changing peoples’ mindsets: but if you keep pointing out that things are wrong about how it’s being done now, eventually you set up enough cognitive dissonance that something does happen. Brooke has done a huge amount to that end with MPs’ expenses (even though some are now trying to squeeze around it). We find common cause on data like this. The struggle continues.

Things are starting to happen, through the work of the Power of Information taskforce.

Here’s the latest: the terms of reference for the study demanded by the POI report reviewing the trading fund model have just been published.

The study will be jointly led by Treasury and DBERR; Yvette Cooper and Baroness (Shriti) Vadera are the lead ministers, though the Cabinet Office POI taskforce secretariat will work closely with them. (We’re still waiting on the timescale.)

From the POI Taskforce blog:

the Taskforce will be assisting with this review, particularly looking at the value of the data held by the funds and whether the current business models and licencing arrangements are sustainable.

If you had to set our priorities what areas would you have us look at? Is there any research we should be looking at? Please kick off the discussion in the comments.

From the TORs themselves, part of the detailed work will include

With regards to a priority group of TFs (Ordnance Survey, Met Office, UK Hydrographic Office, Companies House, DVLA, and Land Registry) the exercise will aim to produce a detailed and definitive pricing and access policy for information held/created by TFs and the optimal constitutional structure for the several TFs to maximise benefit to the UK economy whilst maintaining public policy objectives.

Plus:

changes in the pricing policy and licensing regime around information held by TFs may impact on their trading performance and value. Therefore for those TFs affected, the assessment will

• provide an assessment of the business model or constitutional reforms needed to meet the Government’s commitment on access to information collected for public purposes by downstream markets; and
• provide an assessment of the options for pricing the release of this information

We think this is going to be fun.

Richard Allan and Tom Watson - the former a former Lib Dem MP who is now chair of the Power of Information Taskforce, the latter a Cabinet Office minister who set up the taskforce - have set up a blog for news of the progress that the taskforce is making.

It’s fascinating stuff, and we’ve been remiss in not noting more of it here.

For instance, there’s a proof-of-concept for crime mapping, including a presentation where the slides say things like “Is it safe to park my car here?” “Has crime in my area gone up or down?” and “How can I do something about it” - for as it points out, “Call to action [is] almost completely missing in existing mapping propositions”.

(On crime mapping, The Register is echoing the Times reporting today that the Information Commissioner thinks there are “privacy issues”. We feel sure we’ve heard this before - oh, because we actually looked into it, and found there isn’t a real objection. The comments on the Times piece are interesting, because they indicate that people *want* crime mapping, and think the objections of “the property industry” and the ICO are trivial. However one of the comments on the Register piece is interesting:

I’ve seen this … the Met Version. Working. With real data.

It had nothing to do with BoJo the clown. It was already being worked on for ages before, BoJo just made it a plegde and got lucky in the sense that it was already working before the election

.

The only thing that concerns me is that a visual representation will encourage house prices in certain areas to go into freefall as the red areas (high crime) are highlighted. Funnily enough anywhere near a train station (Underground or National) seems to have higher ratings than other parts of the boroughs but overall the map has average crime levels.

I suppose we will have to wait and see if this makes the police take less action in the red areas to reduce reported crime or tackle stupid things in the whole of London to raise the baseline average……

)

Which is a long diversion from the POI blog. Where you’ll find plenty of fascinating information, such as the old model for Parliamentary data:

and the new model such as can be used by theyworkforyou:

Get on and add it to your feeds. This is important stuff. And, even more importantly, it’s government being done transparently: when you can see what people are thinking, it helps you to influence it.

(Update: the comments feed isn’t obvious, but you can get it here er, here (thanks, Simon in the comments.)

New guidance will mean that there will be more crime mapping: a paper published by the Cabinet Office and written by Louise Casey, the government’s crime adviser (the one, you’ll recall, who said that some anti-binge drinking schemes were nonsense) notes, inter (very many) alia, that

Police forces are due to provide standardised local information on crime, starting from Summer 2008, as part of the Government’s new crime strategy3. Some are already providing local information but what will be available from the Summer of 2008 is likely to remain highly variable. We hope police forces will draw on the evidence in this review to develop the information they provide over the next year.

In particular, there is strong public demand for consistency in the content and presentation of information about crime across the country and a strong focus on action. In a survey of members of the public for the review we found that:

• 72% of the public said the format of police websites should be the same across all police forces; and

• 87% wanted to see the same format used by all forces for the information they provide.

Beyond this, we believe there is scope for better presentation of comparative information on crime and the performance of the police and other criminal justice agencies which would be of interest to the public. With advances in mapping technology, there are several examples of crime information available on websites that allow the public to bring up crime information mapped onto a neighbourhood. [Emphasis added - CA]

Mapping and interactive reporting tools are useful and careful consideration should be given to their development and presentation. [Emphasis added - CA] We believe some consideration should also be given to standardising the information they provide on crime, based on best practice, so that consistent types of information are presented to the public in a recognisable and user-friendly format. While the focus of existing sites is local, some consideration should also be given comparisons between areas. An end aim could be to ensure that information is available on a national basis, consistent between areas. This would raise the profile of such information with the public – and a consistent format would make sense to a more mobile population. [Emphasis added - CA]

Jacqui Smith, the secretary of state at the Home Office, responded:

“We plan to publish monthly local crime data and we will take forward the report’s recommendations on local crime mapping and making sure every household receives ‘Crime Watch’ style information about the local fight against crime.

Not sure where that leaves police officers like Brian Paddick who think it’s all too unbearable to countenance the public seeing crime data. But the idea has now been so thoroughly floated, it’ll be next to impossible to simply bury it.

There are of course wrinkles. Stuart Grimshaw, who tipped us off to this announcement, has written a letter to his MP asking what formats the data will be provided in. Which matters, rather a lot. Do we want to scrape PDFs or websites? No, we want a decent XML feed, please. Not hard. Perhaps the police could be issued with geotagging systems - take a photo at the crime, send it with geotags (which can be done with GPS-enabled phones). Aggregate data, remove precision as required by class of crime. Send to web server with RSS output. Job done.

The BBC’s iPM - the radio programme whose topics are suggested (though “chosen” would be overstating it) by its listeners - has looked at the topic of crime mapping, investigating how it’s done in Chicago.

There are two pieces: talking to Everyblock, the followup to chicagocrime,.org (which did the original crime mapping idea, building on the release by the Chicago police of the crime location data); and then talking to Jonathan Lewin, information services division commander in the Chicago police’s official crime mapping effort, and its GIS manager Joseph Kezon. You’ll have to visit the page to get the audio.

Notable points from the blog post:

Not everyone, of course, is happy with crime mapping. On the programme this weekend we’ll hear from groups who worry that crime-mapping could be counter-productive, affecting house prices, increasing fear of crime, and leading to areas being stigmatized.

Ah yes, the fear of knowing too much. Why don’t we just buy houses without ever seeing them? Why do we bother getting them surveyed? If house prices are affected, might it not also push up prices in places that don’t have crime? I’d have thought that more places would show low crime than will show high crime (because crime tends to cluster, for reasons that in hindsight are generally obvious), so that’s a net benefit for house prices; not that those should be the start or end of any conversation. (Please.)

Also amused by one of the comments:

I live in Surrey and we only have 10 police officers and all the police stations have been closed. They appear once a year for a major event and then we don’t see them again for 12 months. We do have a helicopter, loads of speed cameras, town centre cameras and a new video speed check van.

I think the police had a choice of more police on the beat or the helicopter and they decided that the helicopter looked like more fun. It hasn’t caught any criminals yet but they will produce statistics at the drop of a hat to assure you it is essential to crime busting.

The helicopter is very annoying and it would be useful to know the areas where it flies so potential house purchasers could avoid these areas. It flies around and around in pointless circles until residents are forced to report crimes in the next district so that it will fly away.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want more police on the beat. I want them to sell the helicopter and give me my money back.

Yup, helicopters are expensive to run. Maybe if there was a crime map you could decide where it should go more quickly..?

The more things seem to change with government-collected information, the more they really stay the same. The latest example: surgeons’ deathrates, which will be made public under a new NHS scheme.

Except that, as we point out in NHS plans to reveal surgeons deathrates online in today’s Guardian, the data won’t be in a very usable form (at a guess, it’ll be a stack of PDFs - not even Excel files). And you’ll be banned from reusing it in any meaningful way.

It’s all of a part with the NHS Choices website, which will have the data:

NHS Choices is one of the government’s most lavish web projects, designed with web 2.0 very much in mind. Among other services, it promises “a social network for health”. A strategy published earlier this year says: “When people want to comment directly on their experiences of particular services, whether positive or negative, NHS Choices will become their first port of call.” The two-way information flow “will empower people to make informed decisions about their health and social care”.

However, while the strategy enthuses about the power of information in the new web world, it makes no mention of allowing re-use in mashups and commercial ventures. The site’s terms and conditions themselves suggest such use is out of bounds: “For your own personal non-commercial use you may copy, download, adapt or print off copies of the materials, information, data and other content included on NHS Choices (’NHS Choices content’). You will need to obtain permission in writing from us before you make any other use of NHS Choices content.”

Now, let’s be clear that surgeons’ deathrates are easily misinterpreted. Someone who only ever does grommets isn’t going to have the sort of patient deathrate that someone doing open-heart surgery or brain surgery might. (There’s even an argument that what matters isn’t the operating-table mortality, but the 30- or 60-day mortality, since this tells you how well the patient recovered from everything.)

Nevertheless deathrates have a basic utility: it could have helped, for instance, to more quickly identify the Bristol heart babies’ abnormally high deathrates.

Then again, the BBC article linked to there is from 1998 - that’s ten years ago, folks - and in it, we’re told that “ministers believe the system [to make patient death rates at hospitals public, slightly different from this latest scheme] will become a powerful tool to raise standards and share information on the NHS.”

Kind of hard if people can’t reuse it easily. And also: “it could also work as an early warning system to prevent cases similar to that of Bristol.”

The data will need to have extra information, clearly, about what sort of operations were being done; simply saying “Surgeon X: deathrate Y” is inimical and useless. We’ll have to see..

The Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information has put out its latest annual report. APPSI, you’ll recall, is now headed by David Rhind, the previous head of the Ordnance Survey (who also testified to the Treasury on the next census). But this report was signed off by Richard Susskind.

Kable has a short story on it:

Outgoing chair of APPSI, Professor Richard Susskind, said: “2007 was a pivotal year for the UK in relation to the re-use of PSI. Above all, we saw a marked increase across central government in the level of debate over the re-use of PSI. In particular, APPSI warmly welcomed the growing interest amongst ministers.”

The annual report itself is more interesting: re the Cambridge report, it says

APPSI can already confirm, however, that we welcome the tone and rigour of the Cambridge study – it is the kind of detailed and systematic economic analysis of trading funds and PSI re-use that we have been recommending since 2003; and we hope this represents the beginning of a new era of open and sophisticated thinking about the economics of PSI.

That’s encouraging. More transparency helps. And as for pressure upwards:

We intend, more frequently than we have in the past, to provide practical briefings to our Minister at the Ministry of Justice. These will cover key issues such as evidence, statistics and data relating to the impact of PSI; the governance of PSI and principles underpinning its re-use; the enforcement of the PSI Regulations; models and case studies clarifying the economics of PSI; the findings of ongoing horizon scanning by APPSI; and the adequacy and scope of information management activities across the public sector.

Basically, much more focus on on the economics of PSI. It also says it will “follow up” on progress from the recommendations of the reports into PSI such as The Power Of Information and the Cambridge study. And to that end…

To stimulate and widen debate about the future exploitation of PSI, we will conduct an initial inquiry into the implications of introducing a regime under which public bodies would be subject to some kind of obligation to make their PSI available for re-use. There is no such obligation today under the PSI Regulations.

Which is telling, isn’t it?