The Greater London Authority is holding an event this month to ask developers how it can best make its data available for reuse – a plan that resembles San Francisco's efforts to stimulate widespread use of local government information.
An event called "Help us free London's Data", which is an encouraging echo of the Guardian's campaign name, will be held on Saturday 24 October at London's Living Room in City Hall. (Full details at freelondonsdata.eventbrite.com.)
The organisers say that the GLA "is currently in the process of scoping London's DataStore. Initially we propose to release as much GLA data as possible and to encourage other public agencies in London to do the same and we'd like your help."
That means getting developer input before deciding formats or platforms, to make it simpler for them to produce mashups and applications using it.
Among the dozens of people who have already signed up to attend are Matt McAlister, the head of the Guardian's developer network; Richard Pope, the co-developer of sites such as PlanningAlerts and Job Centre Pro Plus; and Rufus Pollock, a Cambridge academic who co-wrote the analysis that showed that making UK trading fund data free would bring substantial economic benefits.
A petition at the No 10 website to get the Royal Mail to offer postcodes free to non-profit and community websites, following the legal threats against ernestmarples.com, has so far got 1,200 signatures in two weeks (petitions.number10.gov.uk/nfppostcodes). The petition, which has a deadline for signatures of 6 January 2010, follows the effective closure of the site – which was piggybacking on other online sources of postcode-to-location data. As the Guardian calculated last week, the closure has almost certainly had a negative overall effect, costing the economy more than any loss to the Royal Mail.
Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog freeourdata.org.uk/blog
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