Open government may have seemed like a nice idea, unlikely to ever really materialise for a long time, but a series of developments over the last week seems to have brought its appearance considerably closer.

On January 11, the Cabinet Office announced that it was to rationalise the structure of the government's websites. It currently has 951 sites; 551 of these will definitely close and only 26 are safe, with hundreds of others believed likely to be be closed. A number of the sites pertain to long-forgotten events and projects, while others will be subsumed into other departments.

This may not sound like such good news, but the upside is that the information won't disappear, but rather be streamlined in order to be accessible through just two portal sites: Directgov and Business Link. From an information architecture perspective, two choices of starting point seems to be a lot less daunting and more likely to lead to users finding the information they need than 951. Around £9mn a year is expected to be saved over three years through this change.

The following day, it was announced that the UK Statute Law Database, which catalogues all UK law since the 13th century, would be made free for the public to access and re-use. This huge undertaking was originally intended to be a paid service, since the costs involved in creating the database have been high. A senior civil servant quoted on the BBC's coverage of the story said that the move marks a "sea change" in the way in which the government communicates with the public and likely to lead to similar moves to improve access in other departments.

Baroness Cathy Ashton, Minister at the Department for Constitutional Affairs, said: "Citizens should have access to the laws of the land by which they are governed.

"The Statute Law Database provides an authoritative and easy-to-use historical database of UK statute law. I hope it will be welcomed as a useful tool for professionals who need to keep up with changes to the law as well as those who simply have an interest in historic and current legislation."

In a similar move, the Office for National Statistics announced today that facilities to search indexes of births, marriages and deaths will start to be available on the Internet from early 2008.

Meanwhile on January 11, the Hansard Society released an interim report (PDF file, 817KB) on Digital Dialogues, a project involving a raft of initiatives around the government's use of social media, from community websites like the Food Standards Agency Forum to blogs, such as David Milliband's.

NMK will report further on the contents of the report and its conclusions next week.