by Julian Todd

A Government is a system for gathering and focusing power to certain ends. Watch carefully how this happens. In the UK the central authority is Parliament which everyone, even the Queen, agrees is supreme. What it says goes. If a long or short document is laid before it, and voted upon, and there are more “Ayes” than “Nos” cast by the members of the House according to procedure, then that is what Parliament says. Literally.

I only found this out on 18 March 2003 because, like millions of others, I was involved in the campaign to stop the invasion of Iraq. The horror of it was that we could watch the event in Parliament on TV and see clearly the very room where 600 very privileged, comfortable, respected men and women who were not in fear of their lives could have carried themselves bodily through the door marked “No” at 10:14pm, and a large quantity of massacre machinery – as Kurt Vonnegut calls it – would not have been flown from from here to there and exploded over living human beings who had done nothing to suggest they wanted to die.

Had these men and women voted “No”, the military orders could not have been given because too many people in the chains of command, from the bomb warehouse keepers to the young men who pressed the buttons in their long-range, supremely high-tech aircraft high above defenseless cities (the codeword for “air supremacy”) would have questioned just what the hell they were doing.

Though many excuses and downright lies have tried to obscure the fact, here were two human events that were inextricably linked. Those doors into the division lobbies in Parliament were the channels down which the ultimate act of Government power was carried. It’s like the fusebox; it’s the place where the load is measured and is supposed to circuit-break the when the power becomes unsafe.

It doesn't matter what you think. Everything I have written above is merely my personal opinion. However, no one can give this many hours to an unpaid programming project without having a lot of passion for it. And there’s no point in hiding what it is or people might falsely guess some other ulterior motive, like money or political party stoogery.

Projects largely define themselves on the basis of the shape of the data, so it is easy to forget and lose track of what made you start it in the first place. It also means that people who have an entirely different opinion to you can use and contribute to the project as well. All we have to agree on is that this is actual data, and it must be presented. The passion merely converts to how much work you put into it.

So, Francis and I have written a lot of Python, Perl, SQL and PHP designed to download, identify, the decisions that have been made by the Government, and we know the names of those in Parliament who chose to ratify them.

One decision many of us are waiting for is when will the Government to release all the geodata it has collected over the years to the public in a standard form so we can build stuff with it. Technically, this could happen tomorrow if someone proposed it as a Bill in Parliament, and it was voted on according to a procedure and passed as an Act. We’d be able to read such an Act in a law library and find that it would lay out the shape of the bureaucracy which the civil servants would need to create to allow us to access this data in an orderly manner, as well as a system for maintaining it.

It’s worth reading these Bills and Acts of Parliament because, although they are written like bad pieces of computer code full of unnecessary go-tos, they say everything about how it’s supposed to work. Look at the ID Card Bill; don’t get fooled by the features listed in the brochure or the cover. The real material is in its text. It’s an extraordinarily huge and broad project that shows just what can be done with a healthy dose of ambition.

Maybe we should write our own Bill to give us total access to all Government Geodata and begin showing it to people. If anyone says it’s impossible to give us all this data, we say “Not so. All they have to do is vote this piece of paper through Parliament, and it’s done. What’s impossible?” We shouldn’t leave writing the law solely to the experts any more than we allow software to be written solely by private companies; they might not get the job done.

The law is what the whole system rests upon. It is what fundamentally accounts for the difference between what goes on in Parliament and what goes on in some particularly well-funded gentleman’s club with its debates, coveted offices and celebrities whose gossip doesn’t make the vaguest difference to the outside world. Maybe we get to vote someone off the show now and then.

People like us don’t read the law. We leave it to experts to look at. When we view the version of the law available on the “Office of Public Sector Information” website we observe that it’s not all there. What we see are a set of patch files that go back to 1988, but these are not the law. The law is everything passed by Parliament back to 1215, consolidated into one single code-base, preferably in a version control system so that we can see where it was on any given date, and how it’s changed visually in colour as we do with real computer code.

Here’s a surprise. There are a couple of companies who have the law partly in this form which they sell access to at an extortionate cost. This is what judges and barristers refer to when they do their work. We don’t get access to it. The Government also has the law more or less in this form in what is known as the “Statute Law Database”. They have refused to publish it on the web.

We the people do not have open access to the law in the form that it is used. We therefore do not know what changes to it Parliament is actually making, so we don’t know what’s happening, even though we can see it happening.

It’s as if Bill Gates were to install live webcams in all the offices of Microsoft and claim that his company is now open source because everyone could see what his programmers were typing on their computer screens if they chose to. He could allow us to vote on who becomes the lead programmer in each office. Such a move would fool enough people that the company had been brought under democratic control. That’s what we have been taught to accept from our Parliament and Government, and very few of us are willing to imagine how it could be otherwise.

We know what access to information, and therefore power, looks like. Accept no substitutes.