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

Thu Jul 29 09:19:18 UTC 2010

On 28 July 2010 17:15, Tracey P. Lauriault <tlauriau at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

That sounds great. the 8 principles are very similar to the open
definition (though drafted later and with some extra stuff specific to
government).

> 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.

Any suggestions for making things more obvious would be very useful.
Do you think having a dedicated gov page on http://opendefinition.org/
would be useful?

> 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.

Exactly, it's crucial we don't get caught up in legalese -- that's
things are kept simple and focused on the basic principles.

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

One obvious thing is to prepare a brief open data guide that could be
translated into several languages. We've been thinking or organizing a
book sprint on this topic -- would you, and others, be interested in
doing something like this?

Rufus

> 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.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> open-government mailing list
>>> 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
>

-- 
Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/