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

Wed Jul 28 16:15:52 UTC 2010

Rufus et. al;

The Cities in their reports to support their council motions or their
"open data" strategies refer to http://resource.org/8_principles.html.
 That is what the City of Ottawa included and council voted on
accepting those principles.  That gave me context to point out that
their ToU was not necessarily in accordance with those principles and
this gave them the wiggle room to consider adjusting and considering
the work that is forthcoming from CIPPIC.

Making your work more obvious would most certainly be helpful.  Also,
one of the products from CIPPIC may be an FAQ on ToUs and may also be
an annotated terms of use, with clauses, explanations as to why those
are important, and some tangible examples.  The details of the output
and their nature are not yet finalized, but those are items that have
come up in the wish list.

A knowledge barrier for cities and citizens in general, is
understanding all this stuff and the implications of it all.
Legaleeeze is killing us.  Your work and hopefully our small
contribution here in this big sized under populated country, and even
smaller, in Ottawa, is to demystify that a little.

Any knowledge you can make more obvious and accessible (linguistically
and context wise) and available, just make what we do all the more
easier.

Cheers
T

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 11:39 AM, 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
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Open Knowledge Foundation
> Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
> http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/
>

-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805