Across the nation, there are Local Government bodies debating whether they should be getting involved with Social media and to what extent. For many, there are questions about how they can best manage the conversations that will occur when they get involved, for others there are concerns about responsibility within the organisation as well as any potential legal issues that may arise. All of these concerns need to be worked through sensibly and properly so that when the organisation does decide to engage, they do so with confidence.

I was originally going to write a post responding to the Federal Governments response to the Gov2au Taskforce final report and how it relates to Local Government. However I think one of the recommendations deserves its own post.

 For the last two days a volcano in Iceland has been spewing ash and rock high into the atmosphere with little indication that it is going to stop any time soon.

The danger that the ash presents to aircraft (the particles are so fine and sharp they can destroy a jet engine) combined with the prevailing jet stream has meant that essentially then entire European air space has been shutdown. This has left hundreds of thousands of people stranded across Europe and further afield.

 If you haven't heard, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has been to see the Queen about an election. Having done that, the British Government is now in what's called Caretaker mode.

For the past three weeks I've been taking part in something call Local Gov Chat on twitter. It's a twitter based moderated conversation  on the subject of Local Government  and various tech and cultural issues.

One of the questions that came up this afternoon was an interesting one:

"What is the difference between openness and transparency?"

 A long time ago in another world my wife and I produced and presented a podcast focused on the Free and Open Source Software world. Running for almost two years in a couple of different incarnations, we were able to have a lot of fun while at the same time we were able to help inform people and dig down into some of the really juicy stories of the day.

 Let's see, the last time I posted a blog here, I was giving the Royal Post a deserved kicking for their overly restrictive control of the postcode information relied upon by third party services such as Planning Alerts UK. 

This time round I bring good news from Merry Old England. 

A while back I blogged about the fact that the Royal Mail had shutdown a third-party provider of post code information Ernest Marples. Well as with all things there were knock on effects.
 

The South Australian Government has announced that it's going to be creating an Open Technology Foundation. From it's vision statement:
The OTF is committed to the evaluation and where proven, uptake of open technologies, standards and methods.

The OTF exists to help governments make better, more cost effective and innovative use of open technologies in order to improve service delivery to citizens.

You know I half expected to see this sort of story from here in Australia rather than the UK.

From this story the Royal Mail has moved to prevent a third party service from providing an API with up to date Postcode information sourced directly from the Royal Mail itself. This action has had a domino effect, causing issues with those sites that had come to rely on the third party service.