Free data

If you are at all interested in fair and easy access to government data, this guy will probably become one of your heroes. Be it patents, laws, books in the Library of Congress or just some simple tax information, he wants to have it available for free online so the people who paid for it, the tax-payers, can use it. The above linked speech is a little long; the takeaway is that good things will happen, and money will be saved, if only there was a policy of scanning everything. Just make the data available in bulk; internet volunteers will make sense of it.
He cites several historical bureaucratic leap-forwards which were not expensive, just backed by the will to do it right. He also mentions these IT horror stories, which nicely illustrate how bad things are:

• The Electronic Records Archives (a general government archive) are handled by a meager 100Tb system that cost $250 million, a figure which does not include any backup or working internet connection. The servers are actually physically transported in a van to the various places that supply data and processing.
• The IRS make nonprofit tax returns available only on DVDs. The files are not in searchable form, they are just millions of images. Many of these images contain social security numbers of school children because "A CIO at Treasury told me he thinks they're prohibited by law from redacting those numbers as that would be altering a government document."
• There is a disturbing trend towards agencies being tricked by corporate lawyers when they do try to scan their archived data. Take the case of the Government Accountability Office; a corporation now owns the exclusive rights to the Federal Legislative History.

ac.uk

I notice that there are mutterings about teaching programming in UK schools, which I think is a good thing. At the very least it will help people understand a little more about that thing you have to sit in front of in the office everyday. Fostering early programming interest is also important; I had to be obsessed enough to teach myself until I got formal instruction at college. At least home computers are ubiquitous now; I didn't own a PC till I was 19, and I had to build it myself (amazingly, I did use it for other things than playing Doom). The $25 PC could make a big difference to schools.