From the Mash the State website
We are a grassroots campaign to encourage UK government and public sector organisations to make their data available to the general public.
What is Mash the State?
We’re a new national campaign to encourage government to release its data to the public.
It’s not a new idea but we’re doing it in a new way.
We’re setting up a series of “challenges”, asking one group of public sector bodies at a time to release specific data sets. We’ll build grassroots support around these challenges, showing that there is a demand for this data and helping people to lobby those organisations directly to produce it.
Challenge 1 asks all the UK local councils to serve up a news RSS feed from their website by Christmas 2009. It seems like a modest request, but only 15% of councils currently do this. We’d like to see them all doing it.
After Challenge 1 is complete (or after Christmas if that comes sooner) we’ll move onto a new challenge. It could be data from central government, the police, the NHS, quangos, or we might stick with the councils. We’d like to hear your ideas about where we go next.
How do I join?
We don’t have a formal membership. You get involved by doing stuff: signing up to watch your council’s page, reading and contributing to our blog, following us on Twitter and getting together with other people locally to lobby your council.
If you’d like to help out with our overall campaign strategy or want to volunteer your technical and design skills for this website (sorely needed!), please get in touch. We’re not a direct debit/quarterly magazine type of outfit. The first rule of Mash the State is no spectatorism.
Why is this targeted at councils?
Challenge 1 is starting with councils as they’re the public sector organisations with the most direct, local and ongoing relationships with the public. After Christmas 2009 we might stick with the councils or turn our focus to another part of government.
Why are you “naming and shaming” councils that don’t have feeds?
We think that all councils should have RSS feeds but we’re not alleging any malice among those that don’t. There may be a whole range of reasons why a council doesn’t provide feeds, from technical issues with their content management systems through different priorities, deliberate strategic decisions to avoid them to those that simply didn’t think of it.
We want to help councils clear those barriers, help advocates within councils make the case for feeds and provide practical technical guidance to web teams to implement them well.
But most of all, Mash the State is a grassroots campaign to help people encourage the public sector organisations that matter to them to release specific data sets. We can’t do that without making it transparent who’s publishing what.
Why is data so important anyway?
Data is the lifeblood of computer applications. We believe that everyone should have access to government data, not just government organisations themselves. Some people such as programmers, designers and researchers may use this data directly but most people will benefit from using systems that third-party individuals and organisations outside government create with it.
What will you do with this data once you get it?
We’re all about getting government to release its data and don’t have any immediate plans to do anything with it ourselves other than show what’s available and where. There are plenty of people out there that will find uses for it and we’ll be showcasing their projects here.
What about people’s privacy?
We’re not interested in personal data about anyone such as medical records or DNA samples. The data we’re after is non-personal and often already available in one form or another via government websites and systems, just not in formats that make it possible for anyone to use in their own applications.
Your site says my council doesn’t have a feed, but it does!
It’s almost certain that we didn’t find that feed because that site isn’t using RSS autodiscovery.
Autodiscovery makes it much easier for human users to subscribe to feeds and it’s absolutely necessary to enable automated programs such as ours to find them.
Please ask the site’s web manager to add a tag similar to this for each feed to the home page or global template’s
section and we’ll find its feeds within 24 hours:
href=”http://full/path/to/your/feed.xml”
title=”Anywhere Borough Council news” />