Browse by Course code: COMP6047

Diverse attitudes to open data

The Transparency Agenda of the 2010/1 UK Coalition government promises to revolutionise government, public services and public engagement, by ‘holding politicians and public bodies to account, reducing the deficit and delivering better value for money in public spending, and realising significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data’, to quote the then Prime Minister. This is an ambitious programme with laudable aims, yet it naturally has limits.

Talk given by Gary Kibby from SOCA at the Web Science Industry Week in Dec 2012. Readings and task taken from previous years.

Practical group based work on reading and interrogating evidence and writing policy briefings/critiques

Only a Digital Britain can unlock the imagination and creativity that will secure for us and our children the highly skilled jobs of the future. Only a Digital Britain will secure the wonders of an information revolution that could transform every part of our lives. Only a Digital Britain will enable us to demonstrate the vision and dynamism that we have to shape the future.

A guest lecture by Professor David S.Wall from the University of Durham. This talk will explore the way that networked technology has transformed criminal behaviour. The first part will map out cybercrimes and identify the challenges they pose for both criminologists and also regulators. The second part will show that cybercrimes are informational, networked and global. In this section it will also be shown that cybercrimes are highly disorganised forms of offending when compared to the organisation of more 'traditional' crimes, but display some new organisational logics of their own. The third part of the talk will illustrate how the 'culture of fear' that has arisen around cybercrime has placed demands upon government and police - demands that, for reasons related to the distinct nature of cybercrimes, are hard to resolve. The fourth and final part will look at the new policing arrangements that are designed, it is argued here, to close the reassurance gap.