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The Europe Roundup: A FixMyStreet Milestone for mySociety

BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, January 30 2012

Photo: Todd Mecklem / Flickr
  • UK | A FixMyStreet Milestone for mySociety 

    After the 100,000th Freedom of Information request sent through the WhatDoTheyKonow transparency initiative, mySociety has just reached another milestone in one of their civic projects: 200,000 reports have in fact been sent through FixMyStreet.

    The website allows people to report on local problems, like potholes and broken streetlights, directly to local authorities.

    The MySociety team writes:

    Those reports are the work of over 87,000 people, 52% of whom had never before reported an issue to the council. That statistic is important to us: we aim to make it easy to access civic rights, especially for people doing so for the first time. 

    [...] Like other mySociety projects, FixMyStreet is, of course, built on open code, so that it can be replicated by anyone with a little technical knowledge. The FixMyStreet interface is already up and running in Norway, and soon, the Philippines will see trials of their own version – proving that the model can work in very different infrastructures. Meanwhile, the basic FixMyStreet concept has been replicated in Brazil, New Zealand, and South Korea. Here in the UK, some councils have bought FixMyStreet to embed into their own websites.

    FixMyStreet was launched in February 2007.

  • Germany | Berlin Police Hooked on Mobile Phones 

    German newspaper Tageszeitung reports that the Berlin police has collected data on 4.2 million mobile phone connections, since 2008.
    PressEurope writes:

    Most of the data has been collected in order to capture those who have set fire to luxury cars, a phenomenon that has been rampant in the German capital for the last five years. In 410 data requests by the judiciary to mobile phone operators, the police were able to identify the names and home addresses of people located near a burning car. "The only problem is they never identified any suspects,"
    Berlin's regional opposition, composed of Die Linke [The Left Party], The Greens and The Pirate Party, is up in arms over the situation. For its part, the ruling coalition of Social-Democrats and Christian Democrats supports the police, arguing that "all the state's resources must be mobilised to find the pyromaniacs"

  • EU | A Tweetchat with Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes 

    Today Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes will have a Tweetchat from 3 to 3:30pm (Brussels time).
    Commissioner Kroes announced it on her blog, pointing to the many issues on the table of the European Commission at the moment:

    This is an opportunity for you to send in comments or questions on my recent announcement on cloud computing, on privacy online, and on the Commission’s recent proposal to revise data protection rules across Europe (on which my blog is here). This is why I would like to get your questions and comments on these issues – and of course others. Just send me a tweet from any time now – using the #askneelie hashtag – and I’ll do my best to respond on Monday. 

  • Finland | Finland Lets You Use Statistics and Topographical Data

    Two news on the open data side are coming in these days from Finland.

    Statistics Finland has confirmed new Terms of Use for the utilisation of statistical data.

    As explained by the organization:

    The right extends to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. The aim is to make further utilisation of the data easier and thereby increase the exploitation and effectiveness of statistics in society.
    At the same time, an open interface has been built to the StatFin database. [...] It contains data from some 200 sets of statistics, thousands of tables and hundreds of millions of individual data cells. The contents of the StatFin database have been systematically widened in the past few years and its expansion with various information contents and regional divisions will be continued even further. 

    Moreover, starting May 1 2012, the Finnish National Land Survey (NLS) will open its topographic data sets to the public. The Finnish Topographic database is considered the most extensive, up-to-date and accurate database of Finland, reports EPSI platform.

Plus

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

The Problem with Crowdsourced Legislation

Writing for The Atlantic, Alexander Furnas, a master's candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, critiques the platform for collaborative legislative markup built at Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-Ore.) behest and launched with their legislative alternative to the Stop Online Piracy Act. The platform, he writes, is "flawed."

GO

Things Online Organizers Say

What do you get when you put hundreds of left-leaning, meme-obsessed activists in the same place at the same time?

One is Rootscamp, a weekend gathering of the progressive organizer tribe in Washington, D.C., that wrapped up Sunday. Hundreds of activists convened for an unconference to talk about new tools and tactics for organizing online. The other correct answer is an, um, stuff people say video targeted to their peers and with a series of guest cameos by leading online organizers, including Rebuild the Dream's Natalie Foster, MoveOn's Daniel Mintz and Julia Rosen, Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz, and others.

GO

European Commission to Refer ACTA to Europe's Highest Court

The European Commission plans to refer the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to the European Court of Justice "to assess whether ACTA is incompatible - in any way - with the EU's fundamental rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression and information or data protection and the right to property in case of intellectual property," according to a statement released by one of the commissioners earlier today.

GO

Thursday 2/23 PDPlus Call: How Grassroots Conservatives Are Tapping the Power of Open Networks

Conservatives are using online social media in innovative new ways, catching up to or surpassing their counterparts on the other side of the aisle. This Thursday on the Personal Democracy Plus call, I'm looking forward to talking with Martin Avila, whose firm Terra Eclipse worked on Ron Paul's 2008 website, and more recently has partnered with Freedom Works to launch Freedom Connector, a social network that has grown to more than 160,000 active members in just one year. GO

Fact-Checking Group Launches Web Video Campaign To Discourage Flood of Deceptive SuperPAC Ads

A fact-checking web site run by the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday launched an ambitious new attempt to stem the expected flood of deceptive television advertising placed by third-party political groups on broadcast networks by providing the public with a new tool with which to contact station managers who would be accepting those ... GO

friday >

U.S. Senate Could Save Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars If It Files Campaign Finance Reports Electronically, Says The FEC

One little-noted item in President Obama's budget proposal this week was a recommendation to require U.S. senators to file their campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission electronically. The FEC estimates that the switch from paper to bits would save it $430,000 annually. GO

Teddy Goff and Joe Rospars On How Obama's Campaign Is Trying to Get Back to the "We"

Getting back to the "we" of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign — the now-legendary level of energy and individual commitment from grassroots volunteers that Obama was able to harness en route to an improbable victory in the Democratic primary and then in the general election for the presidency of the United States — is in many ways the "central challenge" of his 2012 re-election effort, Obama for America Digital Director Teddy Goff said Friday.Speaking with Obama's chief digital strategist, Joe Rospars, and techPresident publisher Andrew Rasiej at a Social Media Week event in a conference room at Thomson-Reuters with a panoramic view of New York City, Goff described the myriad ways Obama's re-election effort is looking to harness digital tools to connect with voters, whether they be supporters from 2008 or newcomers to politics.

GO

thursday >

Team Obama's Questlove Endorsement

In a video, Questlove, the drummer and joint frontman of the The Roots, the in-house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, endorsed Barack Obama's reelection as part of the campaign's African Americans for Obama effort. "When I started supporting Barack Obama in 2008 he promised to bring real change and hope to our country and community as a whole," he says in the video. "This is not a quick fix. It's not like you can take a wand, 'BING,' and just make magic overnight. He needs eight years to finish the mission and we need to have his back." GO

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