Out With A Bang

It was something that I promised to return to and on the day that David Cameron appeared to edge a little near to No10, it seemed like a good opportunity.

Plus, I stumbled across this on Martin Stabe’s blog, one of the boys from EveryBlock and his mission to keep opening up government and municipal data for everyone’s use.

http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/05/open-government-data-and-the-e.html

Which, of course, was exactly the kind of commitment Cameron was making in his recent speech to Tory councillors…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=44 – or, more specifically: http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=142659&speeches=1 … and the following lines:

“At the moment, local government bodies must provide the public with information about the services they provide, what goes on in council meetings and how councillors have voted on specific issues.

“Sure enough – you all do this. But the information isn’t published in a standardised way. Some councils use adverts in newspapers…”

Come the Revolution, brothers and sisters… [and on last night's results, some will argue the revolution is upon us, comrades...]

“We will turn that approach on its head. We will require local authorities to publish this information – about the services they provide, council meetings and how councillors vote – online and in a standardised format.

“That way, it can be collected and used by the public and third party groups. And this move will be accompanied by relaxing controls which force councils to pay to publish statutory notices. That way, we will actually reduce local government costs.”

That, of course, is EveryBlock viewed from the other end – the municipal/government end, as opposed to the side of the fence that Daniel X inhabits prising these 24/7, digital planning and hygiene ‘news’ feeds out of the boroughs of New York.

And for county councillors, the prospect of heading to the polls with the promise of a new, money-saving promise that actually kills at least birds with one stone in that it dovetails so nicely with open government in a new media age…

On the basis of every other integrated IT initiative that either central or local government have ever proposed, it will probably not see the light of day till 2032. But it is a very interesting exercise actually costing any savings out… particularly given out of whose hands those savings will be ripped…

And armed with the merest whiff of a FOI request – and the fact that the Mrs has been dutifully paying our council tax bills for years on end and swelling the coffers of both South Norfolk District Council and Norfolk County Council – the potential impact of Cameron’s plan is not too hard to work out once you start to scribble a few calculations out on the back of the nearest fag packet.

So, county council first. Norfolk County Council paid £128,000 in the last financial year to cover the cost of advertising what they describe as ’statutory public notices’ – road closures, footpath diversions and other strategic planning matters.

All of which, in theory, will be coming to a 24/7 digital feed near you. Scrapers at the ready, people…

As for those little ads which deal with extensions to your house, those are drilled down even further – they pop out of your local district council, in our case South Norfolk. To the 11 months to March ‘08, South Norfolk District Council spent £21,293 on such local advertising.

The tricky part now, of course, is extrapolating those numbers up to gain a feel for the national picture given the potential differences in population, size, scale, etc, etc between so many district councils. So having consulted my local council finance oracle, Mr OC, his advice was to work out a cost per head of population – 119,451 in the case of South Norfolk and 847,948 in that of Norfolk and work on the basis of the population of England being 51,220,531….

… all of which costs those ’statutory public notices’ out at £17,692,342. A year. That, under Cameron’s law, wouldn’t be going the way of local and provincial newspapers.

Now I am well aware that is but a drop in the ocean in the overall scheme of local newspaper advertising.

But given that the Newspaper Society would, in the current climate, view every advertising penny in the same way that I view every quote – ie as a prisoner – there will be one or two provincial newspaper chiefs who may be looking rather warily at Cameron’s thoughts on local government data for all.

The biggest irony for good, old-fashioned free market Tories would be if the Newspaper Society kicked up such a fuss and claimed that those without access to the web were being dis-enfranchised of their ’statutory’ right to know about their neighbour’s loft conversion that their public notice ads were retained – and all to run alongside a free-to-view, open-to-all digital data stream – then there might be a body of opinion who would deem that as a government subsidy, albeit of sorts.

An interesting position to be in if you are still, as an industry, insisting that your profit margins stay unchallenged by the web’s relentless onward march.

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