Technology for Keeping People Honest?

Simon Willison and his team at the Guardian in the UK have brought a dream a step nearer to becoming true for me with his new Investigate Your MP's Expenses site. After looking at government profligacy in the USA I decided the only thing to do was to open up public accounts to public scrutiny.

Simon's site (quite independently conceived) is a practical demonstration of the idea's feasibility on a large scale. All we need now is a sponsor with deep pockets and an interface to Mechanical Turk. The next election is going to be interesting.

Congrats to Simon Willison

Simon tweeted recently to announce that the launch of the Guardian Open Platform appeared to have gone well. Clearly this is a newspaper management that "gets it", and the service looks fascinating from a technical point of view.

I am hoping to find out how easily information services can be built on this content.

The Guardian is one of the things I miss from back home. During my time back in Scotland it became a real pleasure to drop in at the newsagents near the station for a copy of The Guardian. So now I can at least get the content.

Congratulations, Simon! I am really looking forward to hearing about this development project at PyCon in a couple of weeks. Or at EuroPython later this summer