Saturday 25 October 2008

SITPRO Limited - no publication scheme

"Your request has served to highlight to the current management that when SITPRO became a Company Limited by Guarantee in 2001 the need for a separate Publication Scheme for SITPRO was overlooked. Previously, SITPRO was substantially part of the then DTI and would, we believe, have been deemed to have been covered by that Department’s scheme. We are now working to remedy that situation and publish a Scheme to fulfil the Information Commissioner’s latest model publication scheme guidance. Such schemes are to be in place by 1 January 2009. The SITPRO scheme will be available on our web site (www.sitpro.org.uk) by that time."

Sitpro response letter

SITPRO Limited appear to have forgotten to put in place a publication scheme, but at least they have been open about it

Thursday 23 October 2008

Petition now live

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to support a change to the law to make companies owned two thirds or more by public authorities subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000."

PLEASE SIGN: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/publiccompanies/

See also more details on the Number 10 Petition site.

Submitted by John Cross of Confirm or Deny – Deadline to sign up by: 23 January 2009

Saturday 11 October 2008

Access to Information Held by Public Companies

Petition Coming Soon... on Number 10 website - I hope!

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to support a change to the law to make companies owned two thirds or more by public authorities subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Friday 10 October 2008

I Believe in Open

"I Believe In Open is a national movement to increase government transparency in Canada. We're organizing citizens to push politicians to make five commitments..."

http://ibelieveinopen.ca/about/

1. Support reforms that increase government transparency and accountability.

2. Make campaign promises specific and measurable, and report progress on promises and their metrics at least semi-annually.

3. Publish the content of his or her daily schedule, including meetings with lobbyists and special interest groups.

4. Support reforms allowing free access to scientific and survey data gathered by government institutions.

5. Support reforms that make it easier for Canadians to obtain government information they have a right to know.

Sunday 5 October 2008

WhatDidTheyKnow?

We know most about human history for times and places where people wrote things down, what they wrote down was kept, and we can still read what they wrote. Paper is pretty fragile really but seemingly digital records are even more fragile.

"In one study published in the journal Science, 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months." 1


I have recently become interested in the UK Web Archiving Consortium. This is a publicly funded consortium whose members include the National Archives and the British Library. They archive "important" blogs and websites, not necessarily official ones, take for example the "Not the Alan Milburn" blog:

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/pan/11864/20051003/alanmilburn.blogspot.com/index.html


Sometimes it's interesting to see what a politician said then compared to what they are saying now or you might want to record the terms and conditions page for an offer that seems to good to be true. If you just want to archive one page as it is now then why not check out http://www.webcitation.org.