1. The Data Haven

    Author: Taiwan Challenges

    Describe your idea:

    Database established by charter or international treaty. Individuals may register and use DB to store personal data, own content, and metadata. Organisations given access by permission only

    Username is common to any participating website, and data is displayed wherever user chooses.

    eg user updates blog at blogger, and same post may appear on facebook profile but user retains ownership. Friends list, twitter followings, etc are also property of user. Profiles on sites can be closed without loss of data, user retains control.

    What problem does it solve?:

    1. Personal data need not be provided to commercial organisations. In fact, the DB could offer a ‘verified identity’ feature that allows users to be certified as qualified to use certain features without loss of privacy.

    2. User-content remains the user’s property and is only shared with ‘portal’ sites.

    3. Leaving a site does not mean losing content or struggling to move it to another site.

    4. Organisations are prevented from building up detailed pictures of individuals’ habits, relationships, or preferences.

    5. DB collects more metadata than any one site could, which can be made available anonymously – with permission – to participating organisations for targetted advertising, etc

    Type of idea: A brand new project

  2. Historical Data Network

    Author: Taiwan Challenges

    Describe your idea:

    Gather together all known historical records, starting with the oldest, and cross-link them. (Maybe crowd-sourced? Wiki entry for every person or event in history?)

    Births, deaths, marriages, legal records, etc would be a good place to start, then add in tax and military ledgers, maps and so forth.

    This creates a national geneaology database with a context.

    eg John Smith, born 1627, Lincoln, died 1665, London of plague, wool merchant, also served on HMS Elizabeth 1640-1647, married Mary Jones 1650, etc. Similar data available for children and parents, plus images of ship, financial records, etc.

    What problem does it solve?:

    1. Puts historical data into a bigger context and creates statistics which may be relevant today.
    eg it becomes possible to track:
    migration to cities and economic impacts such as changing land values or labour costs over centuries
    large scale effects of events like black death or war
    agricultural output vs climate

    2. Identify change points, and their impacts, such as improved plow in 17th C

    3. Track who is related to who, and enables family histories to go back further in more detail, with historical context.

    4. Helps research genetic variations, diseases, etc.

    Type of idea: A piece of infrastructure or an API

  3. NHS Accountability

    Author: Tony Davis

    Describe your idea:

    A retired doctor. We had to account for every act; something I thought only fair.

    Recently involved in enquiry on surgery closure in a small village where sheltered housing was built on the promise that there would be a surgery in the village. The surgery was closed. The Chairman and Officers of the local PCT misrepresented their position to the enquiry.

    I enquiried about the accountability and governance of the PCT and its staff. It appears that there is none and one senior Audit Commission person I discussed it with stated that concerns exist about the non accountability of the NHS.

    Like the planning site I would like to help construct a site which would monitor PCT accountability.

    What problem does it solve?:

    The lack of accountability in the NHS.

    Type of idea: A brand new project

  4. Spider Graph/Relationships of Legislation

    Author: “wheresmydad”

    Describe your idea:

    Create a searchable view of EU Directives, UK Acts of Parliament, UK Statutory Instruments and (ultimately) local bye-laws so that the electorate can “travel” along the statute path, from birth to current status.

    What problem does it solve?:

    This will allow the electorate to see how laws are created, amended or affected by current laws. EG click on “Robbery” and see all the regulations that are related to that subject, with amending Acts and SI’s etc

    Type of idea: A brand new project

  5. House of Commons “Class Register”

    Author: “wheresmydad”

    Describe your idea:

    As an “add-on” to the wonderful TheyWorkForYou site, the ability to see exactly when an MP or Lord has actually been working in London.

    What problem does it solve?:

    By seeing when an MP is ACTUALLY in Parliament, we can then see if their expenses match up to their workload. eg If they are only there on Wed, to be seen on TV then that’s not good enough, they should be on committees, voting, debating or working in their westminster office if they want expenses!

    Type of idea: New feature for an existing project

  6. a to b route planning for indian railways

    Author: Michael Evans

    What NEED does this meet?

    need for travellers and citizens in rapidly deveoping economy to get best use from transport system.

    What is the APPROACH?

    current railway website is indexed by train number and difficult to navigate. A route based service has a distinct benefit.

    What are the BENEFITS to people?

    far quicker determination of journeys. better resource for businesses.

    What is the COMPETITION?

    depends on upgrade to india railways website.

    What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

    quite straightforward to applying a route planning system. network appears limited and data is clearly scrappable.

  7. ILLEGAL OPERATION of SYSTEM

    Author: Julie Shrive

    What NEED does this meet?

    THE WHOLE COUNTRY

    relates to trying to contact you and e mails coming back when the fax your MP is being illegally maladministrated by PAs MPs with no DISCRETION

    What is the APPROACH?

    What can be done about PAs to MPs ignoring DISCRETION or NOT directing
    > to MP what he should be dealing with. or them deferring They are
    > illegally maladministrating like everyone else since derregulation-
    > Thatcher – and IT and is Civil liberties abuse NO DISCRETION .

    How about getting a petition together for PM from all l those whose MPs are
    > doing this and find lawyers operating same system. But you will need to
    > monitor otherwise it will never get there!!!
    The BNP doesn’t need to get in it is here.Why are the least able in society – cheapeat labour running it unmonitored like robots[ reading off computers] directed by the corporate solely ?
    >

    >

    What are the BENEFITS to people?

    ALL society is taking its lead using consumer based approach using the dreaded CALL CENTRE on corporate remits buying in the unqualified professionals on CONTRACT who have not taken oaths of discretion so defer . When lawyers , politicians & jDoctors do this it causes human rights abuse access & provision fair trial
    .It is not current research practice to rely totally on dubious statistics complied by the unqualified ethically .

    What is the COMPETITION?

    It is not economic to have Call centres that do not address Discretion as those who need it do not go away.NB Charities & all regulatory organisations operating same system

    What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

    Could be done initially via your website You could ask MPs, Lords MEPs to join & promote starting with LAs / PCT/SHA Bring back system before Thatcher where the public had direct contact & those in charge accountable . Those full time should not be just the corporate ??!!

  8. London Sport Program

    Author: Jitka

    What NEED does this meet?

    This is a program which would make recreational sport in London easies and people would be more informed what is going on in their area or in discipline they are into. By simply putting in your post code, or sport discipline, date or ability, you find out where is your nearest sport facility, sport shop, bike shop, or just something happening etc.. People be also able to post their experiences with different stuff to do with leisure in London. This website should be as friendly to use as possible. You can find many websites which deal with different types of sport but would be good to have something simple and friendly to use. Also finding people doing the same thing in the same area, would be great. There is for example the Friday Night Skate, which is well organized, so everybody knows about it. There are other things which people don’t know about or just simply find partner to go rollerblade, run or cycle on a particular day. Information on the www would fill up by users and can be flagged by quality and popularity, so you can always know what is good and what is bad.

    What is the APPROACH?

    Start mapping areas where is what happening and make rough information. Then it would depends on the users what information they would put in. The look should be really simple and easy to use and searching in the database as well.

    What are the BENEFITS to people?

    People would find what is going on in terms or leisure and sport in their area or in discipline or on a date they want to find out the information. Finding partner for doing particular sport on a particular date would be also very beneficial as well.

    What is the COMPETITION?

    I think that London as a host for the 2012 Olympic games should have more active sporty people. In my opinion people would get more involved if there would be more information what is available.

    What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

    I’m not sure about the technical requirements, hosting etc. It will take lots of work at the beginning and than basic maintaining.

  9. Drug brands information

    Author: Julian Todd

    What NEED does this meet?

    The international public, as well as NHS organizations, are remorselessly targetted for the sale of inappropriate pharmaceuticals at inflated prices. The corporations work within a system of legalized monopoly and hide important information. We need a presentation of the facts drawn from different sources that can be used as the first line of defence. It would also point out what information we do not know, suggesting the questions that investigators should be looking into.

    What is the APPROACH?

    Very helpfully, new pharmaceuticals are given new invented unique names, so it is very easy for software to tag them, and track their appearance in the news media, and watch as the companies post their propaganda onto places like wikipedia and build their marketing campaigns. It is well documented and utterly predictable that the money is available to promote a drug that is in patent against one that is out of patent, even when it is undeniably more dangerous and less effective.

    We need an automatically updated chart like publicwhip that scrapes the patent and trademark databases, and lists who owns them, on what date the patent expires (**very important), links to all news publications citing the drug in chronological order, cost of drug per patient, cost of manufacture (**usually a blank, drug companies refuse to divulge this, or blatantly lie about it — see the case of AIDS drugs that Cipro began to manufacture), names of the doctors who have conducted the drugs trials, list of similar drugs, evidence of who invented the drug (**often the drug company just buys it in from a taxpayer supported university, and then pretends that they spent 500m pounds on it).

    What are the BENEFITS to people?

    It will expose the big picture of this this market commodity in one page. Those who are using particular named drugs, have been prescribed particular named drugs, have been virally marketed at to ask their doctor for a particular named drugs, will have a source that’s slightly more structured than just typing the name of it into google, and getting a pile of links, none of which includes price or patent expiration data. This would be easy to make it possible to inform oneself on the pattern a sudden set of negative publicity against a drug (after years of good publicity) that is shortly to go out of patent in order to convert people to the next patented drug — which will be more expensive but might not be better.

    What is the COMPETITION?

    Public Citizen runs the worstpills.org site. This proposal is a simpler across various sources of information.

    What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

    The software may have wide applications, across products outside medicine. We need to scrape trademark and patent data into a single table, and scan across all of bbcnews sites or online paper news sites for a chronological list for each known unique name. This on its own is better than the google shambolics.

    The other data, such as prices and manufacturing costs, could be lifted from the wikipedia, if people include the data there in slightly structured and scrapable form. ie, rather than make our own wiki, use the one that’s there already to gather and host the data.

    One day I hope people in these companies may start to leak info about the manufacturing and research costs on actual particular instances, so we can have an informed public debate about these matters, not just layers and layers of excuses and faked expenses from the most profitable companies in the world.

  10. job publishing

    Author: Neil Phillips

    What NEED does this meet?

    It’s expensive to advertise jobs in traditional media (print, or online job boards), which means that low-wage jobs are not advertised, or are advertised only incredibly locally (a poster in the shop window).

    What is the APPROACH?

    I propose a project which aims to help employers either directly advertise their jobs online (at their own web presence, less likely), or directly into the projects website in a format which other sites can syndicate (I’d anticipate being able to email or phone-in situations vacant ads too). Basically, cutting out the advertising cost, and therefore incentivising people to list their vacancy.

    Once job postings are available, other sites would be able to syndicate the jobs and therefore come up with answers to more local questions:

    “Show me all the jobs within walking (or public transport) distance which operate within school hours, and require IT skills”

    “Show me all the gardening jobs in tower hamlets”

    “Show me all the jobs in a one mile radius”

    I see this working with a new breed of job aggregation sites, perhaps with (eugh) value-added elements like CV screening, intial phone interviewing etc for higher job-value employers.

    The intention would be that jobs could be syndicated to online and offline (e.g. local newsletters) and government agencies (e.g. JobCentrePlus).

    Here’s a picture which might help explain what I mean.

    http://neilphillips.com/mysociety.jpg

    What are the BENEFITS to people?

    1) The cost of advertising a vacancy is reduced to nil
    2) More jobs are advertised
    3) More people are able to see the jobs nearest to them (travel is a huge impediment to the poorer, older, younger or disabled job seeker).
    4) There is likely to be a better fit between people looking for jobs and people finding jobs.

    What is the COMPETITION?

    Competition:
    Newspapers, existing online job boards.

    This idea is an improvement because it helps both ends of the job market (employee and employer) and shifts the value-added element to cv screening, interviewing and aggregation (more specific search) rather than sheer volume of eyeballs on the site.

    What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

    The budget for the site itself could be incredibly cheap ($10k + bandwidth), more with a call-centre type operation.

    However, what this idea is really about is making something quite difficult and expensive, into something simpler. I’m relying on what mysociety does best: spreading the word.