[open-government] News article: Victory for Open Data Advocates in Tel Aviv

Wed Jul 7 21:35:03 BST 2010

Excerpt below.

Jonathan

## Victory for Open Data Advocates in Tel Aviv
## http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/victory-open-data-advocates-tel-aviv

Open data advocates gained a victory Monday in Tel Aviv, Israel, when
a district court there issued a ruling that orders the municipality to
publish its budget in a machine-readable format, Movement for Freedom
of Information in Israel Director Roy Peled wrote in an e-mail.

The municipality was already publishing its budget in book and PDF
form. The decision applies from the 2011 budget onward, according to
Peled. The municipality has already agreed to publish this year's
budget in a machine-readable format.

"The story begins a year ago when the opposition in the city council
asked the muncipality to get a copy of its budget in a
machine-readable file (XLS, CSV or the likes)," Peled wrote in an
e-mail to the FOIAnet listserv. I checked in with him to verify that
the words were, in fact, his. "The municipality refused, based on two
claims - 1. that the law does not oblige them to do so and that the
publication of the book itself and the PDF file meets legal
requirements; 2. that the old mainframe systems the municipality is
working with do not have this option and doing so would require
unreasonable resources."

The Movement for Freedom of Information took the municipality to
court, Peled wrote, and, after some legal back-and-forth, informed the
court in advance of an expected court appearance Monday that it was
ready to release its budget in the requested format.

[...]

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
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