If you haven’t seen Socrata yet, it’s really worth a look – it illustrates the quality of data that could be made available to us in the UK.
It shows that – once we get beyond the classic journalistic question of “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – once the data is in the public domain – that this information can be used to model the big questions of our time – turned into interfaces that allow us to explore and model problems.
Take the data, add crowdsourced intelligence, and you may end up with a much better description of the problems that policymakers face.
It also shows why the Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data‘ campaign is so important.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
