From the post:
First off, congratulations to Jeni Tennison OBE and Keith Dugmore MBE on their gongs for services to Open Data. As we release our Census Data as Open Data it is worth remembering how ‘bad’ things were before Keith’s tireless campaign for Open Census data. Young data whippersnappers may not believe this, but when I first started working with Census data a corporate license for the ED boundaries (just the boundaries, no actual flippin’ data) was £80,000. In the late 90′s a simple census reporting tool in a GIS usually involved license fees of more than £250K. Today using QGIS, POSTGIS, opendata and a bit of imagination you could have such a thing for £0K license costs
Talking of Census data, we’ve released our full UK census data pack today as Open Data. You can access it here. http://www.geolytix.co.uk/geodata/census.
Good news on all fronts!
However, I am waiting for “open data” to trickle down to the drafts of agency budgets and details of purchases and other expenditures with the payees being identified.
With that data you could draw boundaries around the individuals and groups favored by an agency.
I don’t know what the results would be in the UK but I would wager considerable sums on the results if applied to in Washington, D.C.
You would find out where retirees from federal “service” go when they retire. (Hint, it’s not Florida.)