John Bywater wrote: > 1. Why is mySociety included in a pan-government agreement?
mySociety is not. As far as I understand it, central government departments are, and (in this particular example) FixMyStreet was funded by the DCA (now the Ministry of Justice), and so is therefore covered. I'm sure you could find more information about this on the Ordnance Survey website. > 2. Which other privileged data sets do the mySociety "open source" > services depend upon? I'll try to be comprehensive, though of course it's possible I may have forgotten something, for which my apologies in advance if so. WriteToThem receives updates to names and parties of local councillors from GovEval, as it states and has always stated on that website. Mapumental uses house price data from the Land Registry and local transport information from Traveline, both of which were paid for - the Help page has more information on that. Much data is scraped from other sites (e.g. majorities from the Guardian, MEP name checks from europarl), you could possibly class those as "privileged data sets" depending upon your definition of such. All the code that uses this data is available in our repository, and it should be clear where such is used. > 3. More broadly, to what extent is mySociety's position secured by > virtue of having privileged access to closed data sets? We don't have "privileged access" by any definition of that I can think of. Anyone under contract to a government department can have access to this information. If we did not have access through that mechanism, I would imagine we would pay as e.g. having the postcode lookup to admin boundaries on WriteToThem is pretty important! I believe Tom, as part of the Power of Information review, talked with Ordnance Survey about having some way of providing access to information through this mechanism in an easier fashion. Their website doesn't appear to have any more than the fact that this way of accessing the information exists. > 4. Looking forward, given Tom's recent appointment within the > Conservative Party, should we expect mySociety to become more dependent > upon graces and favours obtained through privileged connections, or less? Taking WriteToThem back in 2003/4, mySociety bid for money jointly with West Sussex County Council from the local government e-Innovations fund, was successful, and went on to build the services, using the information available through that. There were no "graces and favours obtained through privileged connections" used to access Ordnance Survey data. > 5. Didn't the mySociety chaps originally want to change our society to > be constituted of efficient democratic process and open public goods, > rather than continue the closed corruptions and under-provisions that > fall from the personal patronage of a privileged social strata? I think mySociety's aim is to give people "simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives". It even says that on the website. Obviously the "mySociety chaps" (and chapesses) probably believe (perhaps in varying degrees) that efficient democratic process and open public goods help with that, hence TheyWorkForYou etc. Or are you saying that it would be better if WriteToThem, a service that has helped many many people since its launch, shouldn't have used the datasets available to it under its contract because they're not free and basically not been a useful site at all? > Since Tom has sided with the Bullingdon Club, yet remains director of an > organisation which apparently builds "open source democracy", it becomes > desirable to shine light upon shaded corners. mySociety has credited its data sources on its sites back to the launch of WriteToThem in 2004. All the code we use to process those data sources is in our public repository, and have names such as "process-boundary-line" which isn't exactly hiding what it's doing in its name... :) ATB, Matthew _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
