Some excerpts of the Data.gov.uk Newspaper that Russell Davies gave me last week. As described by the people who designed it, the purposes were the following:

"We’ve been thinking about the beta Data.gov.uk repository, and wanted to explore putting some of the information contained within into people’s hands in a form that is accessible, timely, and relevant.

It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time.

It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics. (...) We printed 50, and gave them out to a room full of civil servants, who seemed very excited its possibilities. Hopefully it’ll find its way around Whitehall over the next couple of weeks, acting as a demonstration of the kind of stuff people want to make with all this data that government has. And maybe that’ll encourage some more data to get opened up to the public."

Why do I blog this? an interesting initiative to render local public data in an original way. What I find curious here is the use of paper: clearly an easy and convenient way to share content.