Via Tom Watson, I’ve found out about the Show Us a Better Way project. The idea is very simple; I quote from their website:
The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated
I have three entries.
Entry the first: Free our bills! The wonderful MySociety.org people who brought us TheyWorkForYou.com are spearheading this campaign; I encourage you to read the why and wherefore at theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills. More generally, better use of RSS across government is needed. For instance, I’ve been tracking the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill. It would be really nice to be have an easier way of tracking all the documents, like amendments, as they come through. The same could apply to the GLA, Senedd, Holyrood, Stormont and local councils. A central website to keep track of them all would be nice as well.
Entry the second: Following on from that, it would be good to be able to find out what’s going on in your area or that would be of general interest. To that end, anything be done by any arm of government could be tagged with an area of interest and the postcodes it would affect. You might only be interested in recycling in your immediate area, and so might ask for anything that matched ‘recycling’ and ‘SW1A 0AA’ to be emailed to you while for transport, you might want to look a bit further afield and would have ‘transport’ and ‘SW1, EC1, EC2’ or somesuch.
Entry the third: The Consolidated Fund is the Government’s bank account. It’d be nice to have a website that shows the state of the Consolidated Fund and where money comes from and goes to; simple pie charts, updated relatively often, would do the trick. The same thing – again – could be done for different levels of government, ideally down to the ward level.
I think entry the second is the best of my ideas. I might work it into a proper proposal.
xD.