Like an idiot, I managed to get our own URL wrong, so here are those links again in full:

Sign the petition against copyright extension in the EU
Find out more about the Open Rights Group

I also highly recommend pointing your RSS reader at the O’ReillyGMT blog if you’re interested in tech culture.

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?

Welcome to mylifemyid - the site where 16-25’s can have their say about identity issues in the UK. A few simple things to remember:

• We want to know what you think, so contribute contribute contribute. Don’t be shy.
• You must first register if you want to add your comments* - it takes only a couple of minutes.

Here’s what I think will happen:

• The ASBO generation will be remain more interested in terrorising Daily Mail readers and posting nekkid pictures of each other on Bebo than in ID cards or Government consultations.

• To “further the debate” the Government-appointed website overlords will stuff the website forum with opinions they’ve gathered by persuading school kids to fill out surveys instead of going to double maths. Quite a lot of these will be positive about ID cards. They will also display factual cluelessness and logical immaturity, thus proving they were written by Yoofs.

• The Anti-ID-cards lobby will bombard the forum with their well-rehearsed arguments against the database state. General anti-government people will also take the opportunity to put the boot in. Godwin’s Law will be invoked by the time the post-count reaches double figures.

• The forum will descend into an unholy flame war, or will be completely overwhelmed by organised ID-card objectors, and will be disappeared in favour of a non-interactive “representative sample of youth opinion”. Both sides will claim this as a moral victory and evidence that they are right: the Government will claim ID cards are the bestist ting evar, innit, and will denounce their detractors for scuppering “genuine consultation efforts”; the Anti-ID lobby will accuse the Government of astroturfing, spin, censorship, cynicism, propaganda and farting in a methane-reduction zone.

• The planet will remain spherical, the Pope will not convert to Hinduism, the film will be shown at eleven.

• The treasury will be a few hundred-thousand quid worse off.

Epic, epic fail.

* [yes, really]

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?

Today I have been explaining that I am not against CCTV- but if it is going to be used the cameras should be able to provide clear images and all of the evidence should be usable in court. Currently only 20% is usable. At the moment we just have a placebo effect for Citizen UK.

Many of the Samizdata comments focus on Davis’ support for CCTV as evidence of a less-than-liberal outlook, however I think he makes a partially valid point. I agree that the quality of images from CCTV systems needs to be sufficient to identify individuals: the evidence they collect is useless otherwise. Likewise, cameras should be installed so they are actually capable of capturing images of faces. Lenses on 10m posts look down on nothing but the tops of heads (and blouses, apparently). However, as I have previously noted, calling for better CCTV doesn’t imply support for more CCTV. This is where I too part company with Davis.

I fear the CCTV genie cannot be persuaded back into its bottle by rational argument, as public perception and the psychology of security theatre have significant bearing on the current situation, however I think we should be pressing for a massive reduction in CCTV covareage; effective regulation and licensing of schemes that can be proven useful; and improved installation- and technical standards all round.