Information & Ethics committee  There are specific commitments in the coalition agreement about transparency and data publishing that have given an enormous focus to the activity across departments, and they're basic to the agreement.

Information & Ethics committee  I would leave you with the observation that what we're seeing here is a transformation driven by the Web, the way in which citizens, officials, and politicians are interacting with each other and using the Web, and a whole new set of possibilities that it is opening up. What we

Information & Ethics committee  From an official's perspective, the thing you are potentially most mindful of is that if a requester isn't satisfied, there is a mechanism—they can go to the information commissioner—and there's a mechanism for resolving that, on a dispute basis. That's a world you don't want to

Information & Ethics committee  Could you clarify for me what sorts of things you would envisage? I can certainly speak to data publishing, where this is an emerging art—for example, the involvement I have with the worldwide web consortium, which is the web standards body. That consortium has just chartered a

Information & Ethics committee  I know that there are particular obligations around publishing of information. The Welsh Language Act does mean that when information is published by the Welsh Assembly government, there needs to be dual-language versions, and that of course is a significant undertaking. As regar

Information & Ethics committee  We have two freedom of information acts. We have two ratings. We have a rating for England and Wales, and a separate rating for Scotland, and we have different regulators. We have an information commissioner for England and Wales, and an information commissioner for Scotland. Tha

Information & Ethics committee  That's right. It's the same framework.

Information & Ethics committee  The introduction of the Freedom of Information Act is one of the things that has contributed to a culture change among people working in government, and the introduction of social media tools, particularly things like Twitter and Facebook, has meant that increasing numbers of civ

Information & Ethics committee  The commitment of the Prime Minister and officials from Number 10 is real. Those officials who are involved in transparency work know that our commitment is a day-in, day-out commitment by officials at Number 10, and a week-in, week-out commitment by officials at Number 10. If yo

Information & Ethics committee  It's the national government that is setting the thresholds for local government and for central government. It's the national government that is driving the policy. Obviously that only extends to the competence of the U.K. government. It doesn't extend to our devolved administra

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know of any yet. There may be more studies in the U.S., where their policy is a little more advanced. It's of course extremely difficult to trace it, particularly because it's so new.

Information & Ethics committee  This is difficult territory for me. The government has made it clear that the objective is to make sure that the economy is well served by public data and that this is potentially best done with an organization that is dedicated to that purpose. The precise shape of that is some

Information & Ethics committee  On the issue specifically of copyright, there are a number of points to make. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, in the U.K., work that's produced by civil servants is deemed crown copyright. This has been an enormous advantage for the U.K. compared to many othe

Information & Ethics committee  This is Mr. Sheridan. I'm afraid we didn't get a translation on the line.

Information & Ethics committee  No, there's no translation coming through.