I’ve just received this email from the UK’s Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA). I was about to reply that I don’t know why they’ve sent it to me and that I don’t understand a word of it anyway, but I can’t because it’s been spammed from a ‘noreply’ email address. Bad form.

Dear colleague,

Following the letter sent by Stephen Meek on 10 December 2010, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) and the Skills Funding Agency have been working together to ensure that the Interim ULN Agreement is replaced with an Awarding Organisation (AO) ULN Agreement to create and verify ULNs. The agreement was presented to accredited Diploma component awarding bodies in January 2011 and following a consultation process it has now been finalised.  

The next steps are to terminate the Interim ULN Agreement and replace it with the AO ULN Agreement after the completion of this year’s Diploma awarding period. Read the termination of the Interim ULN Agreement. The Termination Notice has effect on the signing of the replacement AO ULN Agreement or by 15 September 2011, whichever is sooner.

A paper copy of the Termination Notice will be sent to your office.

Yours faithfully

****, Head of the Learning Records Service
****, Head of Diploma Delivery, QCDA

An email from Econ Technologies starts:

You (or somebody pretending to be you) have requested a copy of the license keys for the products you have purchased from us. These license keys are listed below.

So if it is someone pretending to be me they’ve now got my keys. Nice one, Econ.

I keep coming across neat tools that claim to support ‘open government’ and ‘open standards’, but have no indication of which governments or regions they are relevant to.

The Open Data…

UK Government Department 10% CO2 reduction programme

I’ve just had this image pop up in an RSS feed from data.gov.uk. Interestingly when I click to read the full article I’m told I don’t have access. So does that mean this image wasn’t meant to be made public?

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Target reductions (actual volume of carbon dioxide that won’t enter the atmosphere

• DWP: 32,942 ICO2
• HMRC: 18,099 ICO2
• MOJ: 17,122 ICO2

The UK government yesterday confirmed its commitment to devolving some power to the voluntary sector, and to ensuring data is made available for the public scrutiny of public services.

Screenshot taken just before 5.30pm, 12 December 2010. Good to see that some anti-Vodafone tweets are still slipping through.

In an interesting article on opensource.com, Melanie Chernoff complains about how the terms ‘open data’ and ‘publicly available data’ are being used interchangeably. I have to confess I’m…

As part of its drive to open up public data, the Cabinet Office today announced a review that they hope will help them strike the right balance between transparency and privacy.

It will be led by…