This morn­ing, Lib­eral Demo­c­rat sup­port­ers and oth­ers unfor­tu­nate enough to have made it onto Nick Clegg’s mail­ing list received an e-mail from the Deputy Prime Min­is­ter announc­ing the Your Free­dom web­site.  Which is great, although a good 24 hours late.

But later in the e-mail, he says:

This is the open gov­ern­ment we have long cam­paigned for.

Really?  Your Free­dom is all you’ve cam­paigned for?  Because that’s a long way from my def­i­n­i­tion of an ‘open gov­ern­ment’.  Your Free­dom is a tiny, tiny step on the road to what I, and half the rest of the inter­net, think that term means.

Where’s the guar­an­tee that the gov­ern­ment will take any notice of what’s posted on Your Free­dom?  I want to see a promise that any seri­ous item that gets a thou­sand com­ments gets debated in the House.

Where’s the full pub­li­ca­tion of each and every bill that passes through Par­lia­ment, and the wiki for us to carve it up and debate it?  Where’s the dec­la­ra­tions of who’s had lunch with MPs dur­ing the draft­ing process of these bills?  Where’s my search­able data­base of mem­bers’ inter­ests, and the API so we can run stats on it?  Where’s the abo­li­tion of all meet­ings ‘behind closed doors’ and the pub­li­ca­tion of anno­tated, search­able transcripts?

Where’s the down­load­able CSV files of every expense for every MP?  Where are the dec­la­ra­tions of every use of the party Whips?  Why can’t I see the Treasury’s spreadsheets?

Why doesn’t the gov­ern­ment run its own web­site show­cas­ing each and every result of a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion request?  Why do FoI requests exist at all?  A truly open gov­ern­ment would pub­lish by default and redact infor­ma­tion only when necessary.

If it’s too hard and too expen­sive to set all this stuff up, just set up an FTP server and dump every­thing in it — Word docs, data­base dumps, what­ever you’ve got.  There are enough jour­nal­ists and bored web surfers out there that we’ll even­tu­ally make sense of it all for you.

We’ll help, Mr Clegg — there’s enough of us out here that want to see a real open gov­ern­ment.  But if that’s not what you had in mind, please stop pre­tend­ing that the token ges­ture of Your Free­dom is all that’s required to dub your­selves ‘open’.