Shona Ghosh

The Guardian loves it. FOI campaigners chase it. Even the Saturday Times Magazine devotes a page to it.

Data has long been the staple of mash-ups, news articles, bar charts and…just about anything really. It’s just another word for information, preferably neatly arranged in nice rows so we can make a colourful map of MPs’ expenses. Or a word cloud of Obama’s inauguration speech. Hurray! These pretty toys have given journalists a reason to live again!

Occasionally though, the toys achieve something useful, and since Wordle the New York Times’ revolutionary Faces of the Dead in 2006, data + journalism has gone mainstream. It’s largely taken off in the US where the launch of data.gov earlier this year prompted calls in the UK for the British Government to do the same. The idea being, simply, more transparency in government. You can look at air quality in California. Or average wage information in Utah.

The Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses coverage has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that transparency is a) needed and b) achievable through data. And so, yanked by the American dog-lead, the British government will indeed follow suit. Maybe. Hopefully.

Speaking at Open Tech 2009, Whitehall munchkins John Sheridan and Richard Stirling laid down the first draft for a UK version of data.gov. The only data available to them was traffic logs, but they hope to sell the idea to civil servants nonetheless. Currently the pair are looking for ways to spin this to Whitehall. “It works with most of the big departments if we say we can make public services better, and that we can do this by making information about a service available,” said Richard Stirling wryly.

Except – and even data enthusiasts immersed in numbers cannot fail to have noticed this – the UK is in the worst recession since 1991 and Brown can barely find the funds to let young people actually have the jobs they want. Let alone funding a database for some XKCD-shirted nerds to plot 10 years’ worth of traffic data on Many Eyes.

So it’s unlikely we’ll be using a British open databank any time this year, but they’re trying.

Why should you care?

Because although all of this is happening centrally in Whitehall at the moment, eventually local authorities will have to publish their stats. Don’t hold your breath though, even the US has only managed to get two states on board so far. Do you know how much of a pain in the arse these things are to get hold of usually? I wanted to find out the mobile phone expenditure of one local council, and had to wait three weeks for a reply. And that’s not even a difficult Freedom of Information request. It’s the same sort of thing as PlanningAlerts – because information is freely available, it’s a lot easier for the public to kick up a fuss about a planning application. Or traffic logs. If that’s your thing.

What next?

It’ll happen, eventually. The downside is obviously it will cost the taxpayer money just when the government is looking to cut back everywhere but yes, it may lead to a general improvement in services. Largely by you spotting something dubious on your local council’s databank and then shouting at them about it.