Can open data win votes?

Some politicians seems to think so. Especially in Britain right now. Remember, there is a general election in the UK in June. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (Labour) called for smarter government back in December when he presented the reform of public sector, assisted by the legendary WWW-father Tim Berners-Lee. Brown talkes about what he … Continue reading →

Beta government – Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck’s revolutionary ideas

The highlights from this weeks Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York – what I call the dream conference for politics, media and technology geeks – are many, but Vivek Kundra’s presentation is clearly among them. Kundra is president Barack Obama’s chief technology officer (no one has ever had that title in the White House … Continue reading →

Redefinition of the word PUBLIC

I’m at the Personal Democracy Conference in New York and after only one hour this seems very promising.This is the dream conference for tech, politics and media geeks. You can join in the conversation on Twitter at #pdf09 (at this point, 2538 tweets are written – a very talkative crowd, the biggest trending topic at … Continue reading →

Behind the sceenes with the eGov geeks at FarmSubsidy

It’s been fascinating to get a peek into the word of the geeks behind (and connected) to FarmSubsidy the last few days. They’ve been running the European Open Data Summit here in Brussels, headed by Jack Thurston, and later today they will arrange a press conference with the tempting title “Who wants to be a … Continue reading →

Time to steal some ideas from Obama

Openness and transparency in politics is important. Very important. It gives indications of how legitimate a political system is. It gives us better possibilities to check whether the politicians are doing the job they already promised us they should do. The more secretive, the more suspect, in my opinion. New technologies are giving politicians new … Continue reading →

Stories to read

Bissy, bissy days, very little time to blog, unfortunatelly. But I’ve read lots of great stuff recently, and wants to share some of my favorite links. Recently, I wrote an article in Morgenbladet about a new law proposal that seems to make EU less transparent. While writing that article, I became aware of these two … Continue reading →