Next Tuesday a few of us at Microsoft Research are hosting a day-long dialogue to discuss the interminglings of data and social/civic life. We’re bringing together a mix of social theorists, commentators and policy advisers with the hope of drawing out possibilities for doing policy making (as well as technology design) differently. Our preamble for the event follows (a printable PDF can be downloaded here): (more…)
Category: News
Announcing Tenison Road launch
Finally posted some flyers to announce the launch of the big data project we’ll run for a year. We hope to work with the residents and proprietors on Tenison Road in Cambridge to better understand how big data matters and what people on the street want it to be. This is a project that is aiming to get at the interminglings of data and locality, and to intervene in the entanglements in productive ways. That’s the hope! … Fingers crossed.
Changes to FoI Act
Some significant changes to the UK’s Freedom of Information Act were enacted yesterday that give people to right to request and, critically, reuse data. It’s probably easy to overlook the implications of this. The way I see it, everyone (including commercial bodies) now have the right to access FoI regulated data and (re-)use it for analysis, analytics, building apps, etc. Whether that’s good or bad, it seems pretty profound to me. See a summary of the changes here on the Information Commissioner’s Office blog.