4 February 2022

Gavin Freeguard

Published in

Warning: Graphic Content

10 min readFeb 4, 2022

Open wound

The UK government published its fifth open government National Action Plan this week.

UK civil society was not best pleased.

Nor was I.

And nor were many others, as you can see from the links in the Meta data section, below.

Caught NAPping: civil society was underwhelmed by the UK government’s latest open government National Action Plan

Parish notice

For those of you reading this newsletter on Tumblr rather than subscribing via email, this will be the last edition of W:GC to appear there, after nearly seven and a half years. The web version of Warning: Graphic Content is moving to Medium.

I used Tumblr to try out a social media platform I’d not really used before, to see if it might be a place to grow an audience, and to ensure there was a permanent home for the newsletter archive online. I’ve decided to move (finally) given I’ve not found masses of engagement there (or had time to do so), don’t love the interface, many people have expressed concern over the site’s approach to data, and the ability to search previous posts may as well not exist. (But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln…)

In brief

Our Data Bites year got off to a great start on Wednesday — watch the 26th edition here (very handy Twitter thread here).
I thoroughly enjoyed chairing a thought-provoking civic tech surgery for mySociety this week on how to ensure civic technology is accessible and inclusive. Recording and minutes to follow, but more details on the TICTeC Labs project here — and you can sign up to the mailing list for more.
Congratulations to my IfG colleagues on getting the ninth Whitehall Monitor annual report out of the door!
I’ve not yet read the government’s plan for levelling up — but I have a feeling there may be some relevant things in there. (A roundtable I chaired in 2020
is, a little surprisingly, cited twice.)
I’m excited to be taking part in the Alan Turing Institute’s AI UK conference in March. Further details to follow… on a completely different note, a reminder that video of the data gameshow I hosted at the ODI Summit is available here.
The Six Nations kicks off this weekend, so obligatory plug for my post on visualising the tournament from a few years ago.
I wondered what might happen to the UK’s data and digital policy after Brexit for UK in a Changing Europe’s new report.
Not one, but two UK national newspapers featured charts prominently on their front pages overnight, which must be a first.
You know how I’ve previously tweeted and podcasted about the Bond films can teach us about data in government? Simon Worthington has taken that to another level (an all time high, you might say).
Tim Harford has published a list of the ten best books for thinking clearly about statistics. If you’ve got any reading recommendations, you can also add them to my old crowdsourced data reading list.
Congratulations to GOV.UK on the tenth anniversary of its beta launch. It was quite the celebration.