First up: The Office of Public Sector Information has launched a beta test of a new Public Sector Information Unlocking Service:

As the regulator for public sector information re-use, we know that people can encounter difficulty from time to time getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. … If you are trying to re-use some public sector information, but the data you need is locked-up, this service is for you.

Secondly, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills has launched InnovationNation - an attempt to break down the “classic consult/deliver dichotomy”:

We’d love this interactive document to become a place where policymakers, stakeholders and interested citizens come together to help move a policy forward, and we’ll be doing our best to act as a bridge between commenters and the civil servants who are working hard to change things.

Finally, let’s not forget e-petitions (the problems with which are political rather than technological), and the use of micro- and traditional blogging by MPs and political institutions to engage with the public on an increasingly personal level.

It would be churlish of me to belittle these positive achievements by demanding that the moon be delivered on a stick tomorrow, but I can’t help thinking if only there were some way of joining up all these initiatives into a coherent, navigable and accessible framework for public-government interaction. That would be a real breakthrough in Transformational Government!

Politicians and civil servants may not be running rings around the intertubes just yet, but at least they’re finally learning to walk. There’s a faint whiff of optimism coming from .gov.uk at the moment and I think we should inhale while it lasts.

What improvements would you like to see in your technological interactions with Government?

It’s great that the Government is soliciting new ideas for re-using public information, but what’s even better is that this competition is accompanied by a whole raft of new public APIs, and the release of gigabytes of previously inaccessible data.

The sometimes restrictive licensing terms applied to Crown-copyright materiel are a sore point for advocates of open access to Government information, who argue that since the collection of such data is funded through taxation, charging for using it amounts to double-dipping.

I applaud this new initiative, which represents a positive change in attitude towards public access to public data.

Get your thinking caps on people. What whizzy data mashups would you like to see coming out of UK.gov?

[In our manifesto], we state there that we will invest in crime prevention through improvements to the built environment, supporting better lighting, alley gating and CCTV WHERE APPROPRIATE. It would be impossible to put CCTV on every street for example and we certainly would not want to do that. The wording “where appropriate” is key here. Where it has proven to be a deterrent for crime and most useful is in shopping precincts, car parks and “hotspots” of crime. This does make people feel safer and aids the apprehension of criminals.

While I applaud the idea of investing in environmental and street-lighting improvements, the fact is most CCTV installations are useless at preventing and detecting crime, and ineffective at reducing people’s fear of it.

We should be limiting camera surveillance to the few places - such as car parks - where it has been shown to have an impact. At the same time, the quality of CCTV images needs to be improved, as do the mechanisms for using video evidence in court. Fewer, targeted, high-quality systems complemented by good urban design and frequent visible police patrols would be a wiser way to spend council tax than mass surveillance. I hope this is what the Lib Dems have in mind when they call for more “appropriate” CCTV.

Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is bad for consumers because it deprives you of control over how - or even whether - you can use the digital products you buy.

While it’s not news that Microsoft has treated its customers with contempt, their household name is helping to carry concern on the issue from geek circles into the mainstream. A personal example illustrates the point: only two weeks ago a friend asked me to recommend a peer-to-peer file sharing app so she could get hold of unencrypted music. She was sick of paying for tracks only to find they wouldn’t work the way she expected.

I’m quite happy to pay for tracks. I want the artists to get paid for me purchasing a copy. But if I end up not being able to, for example, play that track on my mp3 player (because I happen to have one that won’t play DRM files) or burn to a CD (because Microsoft won’t let me) then I’m going to resort to other means.

I could always just buy the CD of course… but that’s old-fashioned ;o) I like the whole digital music thing, I like that it’s immediate and takes up no physical space, but currently it doesn’t serve my needs - unless I get hold of it illegally.

To my mind, there can be no more powerful demonstration of the commercial folly of DRM. Record labels, software companies and film distributors take note: putting obstacles in the way of your customers is bad for business. Customers spend more on products that are the easy to buy and use. The more difficult you make things for them, the less they’ll buy.

Do you have a tale of DRM frustration to tell? Are you going to lose out when PlaysForSure stops playing? Where do you buy your DRM-free tracks from? Hit the “Comments” link and share your thoughts.