[Open-data-census] "Publicly available"

Sat Oct 5 22:51:55 BST 2013

"Publicly available" is defined as:

> Is the data "public" - this does NOT require freely available but does require that *someone* outside of the government can access in some form (e.g. if the data is available for purchase it is public, if the timetables exist as PDFs on a website that you can access it it is public, if you can get it in paper form it is public).

And later refined by:

> By publicly available is meant without having to put in FOI request - so it should be available without further ado.

By reading just the definition, I had figured that datasets that are accessible via FOI were to be considered publicly available. Can the definition be clarified so that contributors don't need to find that one sentence in the FAQ to get a correct understanding?

What about the following case: Canada Post charges $50,000 per year for its postal code database. It's offered for purchase. Of course, since it's data, you need to sign a license agreement as part of the purchase. Now, is the "ado" involved in negotiating, signing and respecting a license agreement too much for it to be considered "publicly available"? From experience, the extra work caused by license agreements is often more than the work involved in filing an average FOI request.

To me, the consequence of this is one of:

1. datasets that have been proven to be accessible via FOI should be considered publicly available; or
2. datasets for purchase cannot be considered publicly available, as any such purchase involves a license agreement; or
3. "publicly available" is a poor choice of words

I'm personally leaning towards (3), additionally because a $50,000 dataset doesn't elicit the words "publicly available" in my mind.

An alternative to "publicly available" might be "publicly offered". Datasets accessible only via FOI are not offered, in keeping with the current definition of "publicly available". I feel more comfortable saying that the Canada Post $50,000 dataset is "publicly offered", but I would feel disingenuous saying to a colleague that it's "publicly available".

Furthermore, I've seen several submissions incorrectly interpret "publicly available" to imply "free", and indeed the screaming "NOT" in the current definition suggests that the authors of the census continue to face such misinterpretations. Although I recognize that "publicly available" is a beautiful and popular term, it seems that many people do not agree about what it means, so best to use a different term.

What are the list's thoughts?

James