[okfn-discuss] Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data"

Tue May 19 17:53:33 UTC 2009

This looks great Josh!

I wonder if there's any way you would consider alluding to the OKD in
the body of the text, as well as towards the end?

E.g. by saying OKD compliance is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for open government data?

Jonathan

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Josh Tauberer <tauberer at govtrack.us> wrote:
> Hi, all. I'm sorry I haven't had the time to say much here, though I've
> tried to watch the progress. Over the last several months I've been writing
> an essay-
>
>  Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data"
>  http://razor.occams.info/pubdocs/opendataciviccapital.html
>
> -which addresses a small portion of the issues that have come up in this
> group, so I thought I would share it here. The motivation to write this
> started at Transparency Camp [1] a few months ago, and at the end of the
> conference Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat, and later I, decided to take on the
> project of bringing together a repository of best-practices guides for
> technology’s role in an open government. (We have a wiki page for the
> project [2] which lists some of the guides we’d like to see written.)
>
> The goal of Open Data is Civic Capital was 1) to motivate why open
> government data isn’t just an ideological issue but actually makes society
> more powerful, and can really make the world a better place, and 2) to
> outline some suggested priorities and recommendations for open government
> data, drawing on the recommendations of a number of past groups. The essay
> begins:
>
>    “Creating a well-informed public is a core value of representative
> government. It is a prerequisite for ensuring the best representatives are
> elected and a crucial component of government oversight—as well as being
> important in areas well beyond civics. This document speaks to why public
> government data (also called ‘public sector information’) is a valuable
> resource to society if put on the Web and shared freely with the public, and
> discusses how to go about doing it. We discuss technological considerations
> and end with sixteen guiding principles for best practices in open
> government data.”
>
> Hopefully you find this useful/informative (as opposed to spam :-).
>
> [1] http://transparencycamp.org/
> [2] http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/Best_Practices
>
> --
> - Josh Tauberer
> - GovTrack.us
>
> http://razor.occams.info
>
> "Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation!  Yields
> falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
> Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
>
>
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray

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