The Environment Agency has published several online resources about the ongoing investigation into the Buncefield oil disaster of 11 December 2005:
Buncefield Investigation – a collection of the main reports.
Archive for June, 2006
Buncefield Oil disaster reports
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006Student breaks story with FOIA
Monday, June 26th, 2006Last year I spoke to the Association of Journalism Educators about the importance of teaching students about the Freedom of Information Act. So I was pleased to receive an email from one of the lecturers at Sheffield University telling me how an FOI assignment for their investigative journalism module had led one student to the front page of the local newspaper.
Third-year journalism student Hannah Postles made an FOI request to Wakefield top security prison asking for a list of confiscated items. The answer she received was a surprising inventory of pornographic DVDs, mobile phones and newspaper cuttings about prison staff. Hannah suggested the story to the news editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post where she was doing work experience and it was splashed on the front page.
Hannah, 21, said: “When I took the information to the newsdesk I didn’t think in a million years it would make the front page splash. It was really exciting to see the information from my request develop into a real news story and even more exciting to see the finished story and my byline on the front page the next day.”
An account of the story is posted on Sheffied University’s Department of Journalism page.
This is a great example that should inspire more teachers to integrate the Act into their journalism courses.
Police FOI contact details
Tuesday, June 13th, 2006I’ve obtained a list of the FOI contact points for all the UK police forces. The format is a bit weird at the moment, but my tech team is working on it, and it should be fixed shortly.
Article: Free Our Data
Sunday, June 11th, 2006How can public information be free if there’s a charge?
Guardian, 8 June 2006
By Heather Brooke
It may be a modern version of squaring the circle. According to the director of the Office of Public Sector Information (Opsi), Carol Tullo, it is feasible to open up the government’s stores of data, uphold copyright and charge the public for official information. Speaking recently at a conference of freedom of information officers from government, she said: “Why should we be gatekeepers? We have enough to do in our day jobs than to worry about what the local economy may find interesting.”
The default position of government should be to trade in information, Tullo said, adding that transparency and openness benefits government in many ways. She cited the non-political website TheyWorkForYou.com – which repurposes data from Hansard online to let users find out about MPs’ voting records, attendance and even register of interests – as an example of how making government information available can benefit society.
“The people at TheyWorkForYou.com have said to me, ‘we shouldn’t be providing this [site]. This is something government should have been providing.’ Actually, no. This is a perfect example of entrepreneurial private-sector activity,” Tullo said.
So does the example of that site mean the Free Our Data campaign – which aims to get government to make available at no cost the non-personal data it collects, such as mapping and environmental information – is misguided? Is the problem simply with the private sector?
Unsurprisingly, no. The creators of TheyWorkForYou risked prosecution to build the site, because parliament (and through it, Opsi, which regulates crown copyright) initially refused to grant permission for them to re-use the Hansard data that was freely available online. It’s just another indication of how the system of assigning “copyright” and “value” to government data stifles wider innovation.
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