We like data at CF Labs – indeed we’d be nothing without lots of lovely data to build our apps around. So it’s logical that we’re committed to opening up and sharing data that we feel is in the public interest but is withheld unnecessarily or unfairly – think raw, infinitely useful data idling on dusty government shelves (virtually speaking) or customer account data (including YOUR personal information) locked-down in alcatraz-like corporate silos.
We’ve been feeling our way around in this area, submitting pilot Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information requests to various bodies in an effort to hone our information-extracting skills to the level of some of the more frequent denizens over at the excellent WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Our exploits thus far are documented in the new DataBlog section here on the site. Definitely worth a read in the case of one big commercial concern at least.
But we haven’t stopped there. As firm believers in the principles of leading by example, share and share alike and giving something back, we’re currently involved in exploring ways of getting Consumer Focus data out there for use by the development community. CF commissions veritable mountains of research on an enormous range of consumer-related subjects which, after inclusion in reports, invariably ends up languishing on the system in a folder within a folder within a long-forgotten folder. It’s a common situation. Fortunately, CF shares our vision of sharing the data and to this end we’re investigating the status of licensing agreements between CF and its research contractors to make this happen at a point in the not too distant future – watch this space for developments.
On Wednesday (5th August 2009) I attended TJam – a Tesco event to unveil the latest version of their experimental API. The event was hosted at Microsoft’s London offices, and was attended by developers from all over the UK.
What have we been up to?
By Dafydd Vaughan Monday October 19, 2009
We’ve been really quiet on the public front lately, but there has been a lot going on internally. This is an update on everything that we’ve been up to and what we’ve got planned for the next few months.
Our work on the Stay Private project has continued amongst our other duties. We now have a framework in place and are starting to build the part that submits information to the Telephone Preference Service. As you might imagine, this is one of the most complicated parts of the system as there are multiple forms that need to be submitted for the process to work. We are hoping to have a very early stage test site available in the next few weeks.
We’ve continued to chase Tesco with our data protection request. They have finally responded and sent some of our data to us – although it isn’t quite what we were expecting. I’ll be posting some more details about this on our data blog shortly. (Update: You can read the response from Tesco here).
Some people may have noticed that we’ve moved our websites to a new server. Up until now, we’d been using Slicehost as our hosting provider. While they did a good job and served us well, we weren’t that comfortable with using a server based in the USA. This would have been of particular concern when we got around to launching the Stay Private website. As a result, we’ve moved everything to a new UK based server.
CF Labs has also recently taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. We felt that we were best placed to manage new developments and overall strategy including introducing a social media programme. One of our first priorities is to move it away from the current ASP.NET system to the open source Wordpress CMS. This work is currently on going and is due to be completed in a few weeks time. While the website will not look any different (aside from a few small layout changes), moving it to Wordpress means it’ll be more flexible and easier to maintain. We’re also looking at how we can make Consumer Focus reports and publications more open by using the Commentariat theme developed by the people over at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
As you can see, there are quite a few bits and pieces going on. We’ll keep you updated as work progresses.