So, some digital informationhas leaked from its home. Its been played with by an excel monkeyand plottedon maps. It shouldn’t have happened, but it has. Doh! doesn’t quite cover it when I think of the stupidity of some people. While there are many political uses of the information, the lists of names of membership of any organisation should be kept private. Lists of names, as Tom Steinberg (MySociety) said, start us down a path best not begun....

It’s been a busy fortnight for open-information projects and campaigns. Widely announced and re-announced were the winners of the Show Us A Better Way (SUABW) competition, sponsored by the Government, which sought new solutions to perhaps unknown problems. SUABW asked people what web-based tools they would build from public data-sources that would improve the way public information is shared and presented. The winners are: Can I Recycle It? UK Cycling Catchment Areas Location of Postboxes Loofinder The BBC PM report referred to a court case being thrown out because a piece of law that the case was built on had been taken off the statute book....

Local residents group North West Two are now using Fix My Street to file reports with Brent Council. I’ll be working with the other residents groups in my area to get links to FMS on all the community websites I can. Fix My Street (FMS) is A LOT faster and easier than using the Brent Council reporting system. All I need to do to report via FMS is enter the street name, choose the right street and then write up the problem....

News earlier this year was that the Heritage Lottery Fund announced stage 1 funding towards a grant of £1.2 million to help restore Dollis Hill House. This would have enabled Dollis Hill House Trust (DHHT) to work with Training For Life and Brent Council to annex a section of a public park for pseudo-social-enterprise, or, in the words of the DHH, to bring about the “commercial exploitation of the house’s prime and dramatic location, balanced with a positive vision of the house’s future as a cohesive focus for the growing and increasingly diverse population of the surrounding area....

Today I’ve accessed three different MySociety websites: TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem and WhatDoTheyKnow. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without these powerful tools: MySociety are indespensible and we’d all miss them if they weren’t here. I was using WriteToThem to contact Sarah Teather to urge her to support Early Day Motion (EDM) 2141 that her parliamentary colleague Jo Swinson has tabled.  FREE OUR BILLS CAMPAIGN, 22.07.2008, Swinson, Jo That this House believes it has a duty to publish Bills in such a fashion that they can be accessed as easily and as early as possible by the public; notes that the non-partisan Free Our Bills campaign is urging the House to publish bill texts in a new electronic format to improve accessibility and public scrutiny of legislation; further notes that the changes requested would have no impact on the content of Bills, nor upon the process by which they are currently made; considers that the new format could be delivered cheaply and quickly; acknowledges that the Leader of the House’s office did not accept a prior request for new formatting from mySociety, nor provide an explanation of why the changes could be made; and calls on the Leader of House to ask House of Commons Clerks to work with Free Our Bills campaign staff to commence publication of Bills in the new format....