For anyone interested in open government, data management and development of digital services, we recommend you check out this video from the Guardian. As the description notes:
‘An elite team of digital experts has sparked a radical shake-up in the way the government does its business. Some of the UK’s best designers and developers are working on building a new single website for all government departments – gov.uk – but their influence has gone much further.’
Open government is about making governments more efficient, transparent, and accountable. There is clearly a lot that technology has to offer in this regard, and the UK has been leading the charge in developing more open, agile and integrated digital platforms for government. Part of this project has been the launch of data.gov.uk – a website that’s primary aim is to make public data more accessable to help people understand how government works and how policies are made. Data.gov.uk hosts over 9,000 data sets which can be downloaded and used by citizens to build useful tools to observe trends, compare different areas of government, or analyse how effective policy changes have been over time.
If you’re interested in other open government initiatives around the world see our 2012 Working Paper: 2012/02: International Data Management for Government.