Last night I attended a set of talks organised by Open Data Manchester, as part of Manchester's excellent Future Everything festival that is running this week. The talks were about how open data sets can be beneficial to the "Third Sector" - voluntary, charity and community work, to benefit the disadvantaged.

Since our inception, the openness of government has been a key stone of Pirate politics. A democratically run country absolutely requires openness and transparency to exist, in order to make the elected representatives accountable to the electorate. It's through obfuscation of data, back door deals, and deliberate misuse of facts and statistics that a government manipulates their position of power to their own ends, strengthening their own position, and eroding the ability for the electorate to hold them accountable, creating a vicious circle. The end result of this is a direct route towards absolute power, and, as we all know,  absolute power corrupts absolutely.

After being put to member vote the results for the latest amendments to the Party constitution are now available. Members voted in favour of accepting all of the proposed amendments and the new Constitution is now available.

As an immediate consequence of these amendments the following must occur:

• The NEC must have a Code of Practive which should refer to all voting NEC positions other than Leader & Deputy
• The Board must empanel a Financial Oversight Committee - it does already informally have one but this must become an official one
• Nominations for Deputy Leader must open as soon as practicable
• The NEC must designate a voting NEC member who is responsible to the party for the management of the party's finances - it may do this via its Code of Practice

I attended the Manchester ORG meetup tonight; the first meetup of 2015 chaired by the head of ORG, Jim Killock. The subject was a topic dear to my heart: Dragnet Internet Surveillance, and how it affects all of us.  An easy thing to focus on when discussing mass surveillance is the "needle in a haystack" approach that is so favoured by the current Home Office, and all those that have come before: The idea that "they" are not reading your email, "they" are only looking for bad actors in amongst that sea of information. This response tackles the issue at far, far too high a level: The question isn't whether an individual's email is or is not being read; the underlying issue is that people are forced to change their behaviour on the basis that they may be being watched. That is a direct attack on everyone's liberty.