To be honest, I don't really understand why a councillor should have to do this, but it's good that one is.
Councillor Iain Roberts (Lib Dem) of Stockport council is republishing council agendas on his blog by using a 3rd party document publishing tool, embedding it on his blog, and highlighting relevant sections. Pulling out spending, budget or other data and putting them in context.
One thing we forget at our peril in the open data agenda is the information that's hidden away in PDFs on council websites in documents. When it's a PDF - that means it's pretty much NOT searchable, not re-usable and not commentable - that's digital information jail - not something we want in local democracy.
Councillor Roberts says "Although I'm just taking a document that's online in place A and copying it to place B, I think having it as an embedded document in a web page with commentary (rather than a dry meeting title someone has to download and search to find out what's in it) makes a significant difference. It allows me to report on what the Council's doing, whilst giving people an easy way to check on the source material if they want more information - or just to know whether I'm being honest or not!"
Updated: I should say it IS for councillors to highlight and add editorial comment, but it is for councils are corporate bodies to put the agendas and other open documents online in an accessible and preferable machine-readable format.
