Tim Almond

I skipped the coffee… caffeine not such a good idea at this time.

Anyway, I’m thinking about Conservative plans to have a search engine for spending on items over £25,000.

I think that there’s something else. As well as the search engine, give us the option to just grab the whole list as a dataset. OK, it’s going to be massive, but deliver it via BitTorrent, and that should distribute the load. Allow the data to be mirrored.

By doing this, people can do more detailed analyses. More applications can be built to use the data.

There’s something else that the Conservatives should do that the US does. There’s a rule in the US - any data generated by public spending is freely available. So, let’s say the government does some research. It should be available on the net for us to read.

While we’re at it, release the postcode data. The costs of getting things like postcode and co-ordinate data cost everyone money from the monopoly that is Royal Mail. Just give it up. Let anyone get hold of the data.

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Tags: Politics, Technology //