[okfn-labs] where is the data - is labs / services interested?

[Tom Rees]

One other product in our ecosystem of experiments and legacy things is
http://getthedata.org/, which is a Q&A site with some voting power (based
on OSQA). It never gained a great deal of traction. Clearly it's related,
though, and we should understand why it never took off before trying
another similar experiment.

My $.02: Embedding a feature like this in a region-specific site (like
africaopendata.org) will be more relevant to users and likely gain more
traction than general-purpose global efforts like getthedata / isitopendata
/etc.

My other $.02: "Question is: will reinventing the wheel take less time than
force adapting an already existing one." -- how many more programmers will
need to learn the answer to this the hard way? (I suspect 100% :-)

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Michael Bauer <michael.bauer at okfn.org>wrote:

> Friedrich,
>
> To be honest I had an in depth look on what my society is doing and was
> quite turned off by their system. Havend looked that much at froide though.
> I agree that the system is very similar. Question is: will reinventing the
> wheel take less time than force adapting an already existing one.
>
> Ad notifications: that would be the role of a moderator person - who needs
> to be there anyhow to see whether requests have been followed up with.
>
> Michael
>
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:52:22PM +0200, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > so help me understand how this is different. At the moment it seems to
> > be a simple "post and idea" thing, which has little interactivity. In
> > the medium term you'll want to extend it, to:
> >
> > a) Make it google-indexable so that people can find previous requests.
> > b) Notify government officials when new requests come in
> > c) Add voting so that people can express their interest in a dataset
> > (i.e. it becomes a type of petition system).
> >
> > So, I agree that what you have now is a nice demo, but I wonder if
> > there really isn't enough shared mass with existing FoI or Petitions
> > systems to go from there, rather than reinventing the wheel?
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> >  - Friedrich
> >
> > On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Michael Bauer <michael.bauer at okfn.org>
> wrote:
> > > Friedrich,
> > >
> > > Alaveteli and FrOI-DE are both more targetet towards FoI requests and
> thus
> > > a very different breed (IMO). isitopendata.org is a service before
> unknown
> > > to me and seems to target something different  - inquiries for terms
> and
> > > conditions for existing data. So I think there is a niche for it to
> live
> > > in. But I'd defer to these kind of services if the majority agrees
> there is
> > > such a thing that's useable.
> > >
> > > Michael
> > >
> > > On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:02:30PM +0200, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:
> > >> Hey Michael,
> > >>
> > >> I saw it when you posted it to twitter, it's a nice hack. My question
> > >> is whether we really need to build a new technology for this, when we
> > >> have both Alaveteli and OKFN's own FrOI-DE
> > >> (https://github.com/stefanw/froide) and http://www.isitopendata.org/.
> > >> Of course both of these would require some textual adaptations and
> > >> perhaps a voting button, but that seems light-years simpler than
> > >> starting from scratch.
> > >>
> > >> What do you think?
> > >>
> > >> - Friedrich
> > >>
> > >> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 11:54 AM, Michael Bauer <
> michael.bauer at okfn.org> wrote:
> > >> > All,
> > >> >
> > >> > While in tanzania I hacked together a little plattform called where
> is the
> > >> > data? that allows people to enter datasets they would want to be
> released
> > >> > by the governments. It was built in about 3-4h of hacking together
> > >> > jekyll/bootstrap/recline and gdocs and is very minimal. It's up on
> > >> > http://mihi-tr.github.com/whereisthedata-tz/ with some demo
> requests.
> > >> >
> > >> > I demoed it to Justin Arenstein and he's very interested in making
> this
> > >> > part of africaopendata.org and the upcoming
> code4(ghana|tanzania|kenya|africa)
> > >> > programs. My aim now is to make it easily adaptable and then launch
> this as
> > >> > a set of micro plattforms. To succeed there needs to be one person
> > >> > moderating the process in each country - e.q. having contact with
> the Gov
> > >> > and checking whenever datasets are released. It's net costs right
> now are 0
> > >> > + 4h of work.
> > >> >
> > >> > My question: Is the OKFN (OFKN-Labs/OKFN-Services) interested as
> part of
> > >> > this?
> > >> > Michael
> > >> >
> > >> > --
> > >> > Data Wrangler with the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN.org)
> > >> > GPG/PGP key: http://tentacleriot.eu/mihi.asc
> > >> > Twitter: @mihi_tr Skype: mihi_tr
> > >
> > > --
> > > Data Wrangler with the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN.org)
> > > GPG/PGP key: http://tentacleriot.eu/mihi.asc
> > > Twitter: @mihi_tr Skype: mihi_tr
>
> --
> Data Wrangler with the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN.org)
> GPG/PGP key: http://tentacleriot.eu/mihi.asc
> Twitter: @mihi_tr Skype: mihi_tr
>
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-- 
Tom Rees
Technical Lead
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org
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