[open-government] 1. It's not Open Data, so stop calling it that...

[Jonathan Gray]

This was one of the key objectives of the November Open Government
Data Camp. But would probably be useful to have a thread on that here
before the event.

I guess the two main bits were:

  1. Legally open (i.e. compliant with opendefinition.org)
  2. Technically open (i.e. released in machine readable format, if applicable)

What do people think?

J.

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 5:39 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> Thanks for this really interesting update Tracey.
>
> For me it is simple: open data mean compliance with
> http://opendefinition.org/. I wonder if it would be useful to create a
> dedicated page for public/gov data that could be linked to at e.g.
> http://opendefinition.org/gov/?
>
> There's also: http://www.opengovernmentdata.org/ with its what and why pages ...
>
> Rufus
>
> On 28 July 2010 13:41, Tracey P. Lauriault <tlauriau at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Greetings all;
>>
>> I am really glad that Glen created that post and Jonathan circulated
>> it.  The problem he identified is recognized here in Ottawa and a
>> process is in place to address that Terms of Use.
>>
>> The City of Vancouver Open Data advocates created this ToU without
>> much thought, and the City's legal team accepted it.  City legal teams
>> are not necessarily experts in these matters and tend to be very
>> conservative, risk averse and are not necessarily aware of what is
>> going on the world of technology and data.  The 3 other cities that
>> opened their data found it easier to just copy the Vancouver ToU.  The
>> legal team figured that if one city accepted it, it must be good
>> enough for them to.
>>
>> When this ToU was implemented in Ottawa, users voiced concern,
>> especially the open street map folks on a listserve called
>> civicaccess.ca. As a result, I communicated with the City and created
>> a legal advisory group with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public
>> Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) (http://www.cippic.ca/en/) who agreed to work
>> on this issue and dedicated research resources on this topic for the
>> summer.  I also conducted a public consultation at Change Camp Ottawa
>> 2010.  CIPPIC is now reviewing a draft memo on this topic and we
>> should have something to go out to consultation next week.
>>
>> The City of Ottawa has started a working group on this topic with the
>> other "open data" cities and it is expected that the recommendations
>> on modifying the ToU will be adopted.
>>
>> Citizens like myself would not have been able to have the ear of the
>> City of Ottawa and any of the other "open data" cities, if we did not
>> have this public interest legal clinic. Lawyers, it seems, listen to
>> other lawyers, and it is very hard to find pro-bono lawyers to do this
>> work, let alone for a citizen to convince a city to hire a team of
>> lawyers to modify something they see as non-problematic, and then
>> share those resources with other cities.
>>
>> Here is a link to a write up
>> (http://traceyplauriault.ca/2010/07/21/changecamp-ottawa-2010-open-data-terms-of-use-session/)
>> on the consultation that was held in Ottawa.
>>
>> Your input is of course most welcome.
>>
>> Sincerely
>> Tracey
>> https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
>>
>> PS  I gave CIPPIC a large reading list which included licensing work
>> from GEOSS, Global Map, IPY, SCAR, CC, ODpl, GeoConnections, etc.
>> This was new material for them and it was incredibly useful to be able
>> to refer to that excellent work.
>>
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>> open-government at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>>
>
>
>
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Jonathan Gray

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