"The invention of movable type led to a paradigm shift in communication. It was the midwife of the modern world. At the time, however, it seemed merely that monks would have to find things other than copying biblical texts to do with their days. The internet has always been different. Almost from its inception, trying to gauge where the world wide web might take us has been a major preoccupation of commerce, not least the newspaper industry.
The government, equally, has pondered how it might be used. Predictably, its first instinct was simply to use it to do what it was already doing but a bit more quickly. But this week it dramatically raised its game, with the launch of new website, data.gov.uk, which has met with a warm reception. It puts into the public domain every bit of information collected by public bodies that is not personal or sensitive, from alcohol-attributable mortality to years of life lost through TB. Happily, not all the data sets deal with death.
Even a generation ago most of the vast amount of data collected by government was unavailable, and some of it – such as the location of the Post Office tower – was classified as an official secret. At the very least this amounts to agenuine culture change in what has always been a deeply conservative bureaucracy. At its most powerful, it could transform the nature of power."
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