XTech 2005: XML, the Web and beyond.
The collision between traditional democracy and the semantic web is rich with transformative potential.
In 1803, the UK Parliament began publishing Hansard, a precise record of all its speeches and dealings. Since 1997, Hansard has been posted on www.Parliament.uk under Parliamentary copyright.
However, for the lay reader, the existing online version of Hansard is near-useless. Its size, inpenetrebility, and sheer ugliness succeed in detering most constituents from tracking the activities of their Member of Parliament.
TheyWorkForYou.com is a volunteer-built website which scrapes the Hansard from www.parliament.uk and retrofits it onto a data model of UK Parliamentary democracy, thus enabling all manner of slicing, dicing, and light-shining.
This talk focuses on some tactics and techniques which civic hackers in the UK have used to demonstrate many of the benefits of the semantic web and social software, without first asking permission.
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Tom Loosemore
TheyWorkForYou.com
By day Tom Loosemore is a senior manager at BBC New Media, where he has championed the building of solid foundations underpinning bbc.co.uk, including search, single sign-on and content management.By night Tom is one of the founders of a small cabal of volunteer 'civic hackers' dedicated to developing sites (such as FaxYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com) that poke British democracy with an internet-shaped stick in the hope that one day it might wake up.