[MyData & Open Data] Introductions

Thu Mar 14 12:34:10 UTC 2013

Stef,

I do want to address some of the statements you made in your response to me. "Government" as a single monolithic entity does not really exist. The "government" is a collection of departments, agencies and actors that all have their own agendas.  Governments collect data in different departments/agencies for different reasons. Permit data, for modifying a house, widening a street, creating a parking lot, contain various PII data points through showing the address of the work to be permitted. The police collect data on a crime event which contains the name of the victim, the location of the crime event and the crime event itself. Emergency responders collect information on the event and those affected by the event. All of these situations require PII information to be collected for the benefit of those affected by an event whether it be a fire, crime or to install a swimming pool.

Your statement about collecting the minimum information required is something already practiced by most municipalities. In the case of where I work, I often find I have too little data on an event (poor geo-location information with crime data for example). No department I work with uses paper nor wishes to spend additional time collecting information that is not absolutely essential to perform their duties. Like everyone else, public servants have had reductions in force until we no longer have enough people to fulfill basic government functions. I cannot speak for the federal level but here locally we are looking for ways to reuse skillsets and make our teams more agile by decoupling workers from applications management to a more service oriented architecture. 

Maybe it is different where you live but here the scenario you describe does not exist here. 

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: s at ctrlc.hu [mailto:s at ctrlc.hu] 
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 7:14 AM
To: Hare, Jason
Cc: laura.james at okfn.org; mydata-open-data at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: Re: [MyData & Open Data] Introductions

heyhey,

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 09:55:37PM +0000, Hare, Jason wrote:
> Has anyone attempted a policy or a statement on PII redaction in regards to the posting of open government data sets?

what do you mean with redaction? that sounds very analog. which is an excellent protection against cheap/digital data-krakens, collect the data in analog form on dead trees and use a huge tipped black pen to redact stuff. but in the digital realm this does not work. either you have useful data or anonymous, but both does not work :/

what works best in the digital world is to practice data minimization. only collect data if it's necessary, there's no alternative and only as long as needed.

--
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