Musings from Bill
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[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website. There’s another related piece about the proposals]
And here’s its Wordle…
Making laws in the European Union is a long, complicated and often tedious process that involves a delicate ballet featuring the Council of Ministers, the Parliament and the Commission. Before a Directive is passed there will be numerous committees, occasional votes, multitudinous amendments and many, many occasions for lobbyists, campaigning groups and special interests to try to influence things in their favour.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that a package of amendments to telecoms laws currently making its way through the European Parliament’s committee system has received careful scrutiny from those who worry that the interests of the music and film industry are being placed before freedom of expression or civil liberties.
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Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 5th and July 7th:
Great to see Dan O’Brien and Ben Moor at OpenTech today…
more pics on flickr in my opentech set
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[This is my BBC column from Monday – I forgot to post it here in all the week’s excitement (2gether08, New Media Awards, Shift Happens). You can read it on the BBC News website too.]
The publicity surrounding Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft should not obscure the fact that he is still deeply involved in the company he founded in 1975.
Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie may now be in charge, but they were chosen by Gates, worked with Gates and are still answerable to Gates. After all he remains company chairman and a major shareholder, and he will be working as an ‘advisor’ on special projects.
Gates also played a major part in setting Microsoft’s strategy for the next few years, as it continues to try to figure out how to convert its enormously profitable operating system and office software business into something that can generate money as we all move applications online and look for stripped-down, secure and reliable operating systems on our desktops, laptops and handheld computers
When Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson launched his ‘Power of Information Task Force’ in March he was applauded by campaigners for open source software and free access to public sector information and easier availability, but there was a general concern that it wasn’t clear what the Task Force could actually do.
Since then there have been a few speeches, some ideas have been floated for general consideration, like the recently announced Treasury review of how Ordnance Survey and other trading funds operate, and there’s been an interesting investigaion into how crime mapping might operate.
But now they are putting their money where their mouth is – or, to be more precise, our money where their mouth is since they are a public body – with an online competition to find the best ideas for ways to reuse governnment data.
‘Show Us a Better Way’ has £20,000 to offer to people who come up with innovative ways to use a wide variety of data sources, including a massive amount of medical data from NHS Choices and neighbourhood information from the Office of National Statistics.
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