[open-government] Keeping track of open government data initiatives around the world

Fri Jun 25 17:04:27 UTC 2010

Dear all,

One of the core purposes of the working group on open government data
[1] is to "document the background and status of initiatives to make
official information open in different countries".

We have gathered some material from a form we sent out a few months
ago [2] -- but to be honest, much more information has been gathered
from blogs, tweets, reports and talking to people (inside and outside
government) in different countries.

Having an up-to-date overview of the state of open government data
around the world will no doubt continue to be valuable for
policymakers, advocates and others. This is probably something that is
best maintained by a diverse community of people who know what is
happening at national, regional, and local level in their country.
We'd like to propose that this group is well placed to maintain a
wiki-like directory of projects and initiatives around the world.

Here are a couple of examples of specific things that we've collated
information about:

Open Government Data Catalogues
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ams8fpz2_77XdG8tZ2ZrUGoybnlpU0NGTjhiUEpQdVE&hl=en&authkey=CLDY7sYM

Open Government Data Competitions
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ams8fpz2_77XdGV6LXFGa0E3TG5DQkdkRmFKd01zbHc&hl=en&authkey=CNXQlJgC

Going forward it would also be great to keep track of relevant laws,
policies, examples of reuse and so on.

It would be useful to hear what people n this list think about this --
particularly any views on the technology we can use to maintain this.
E.g. we could use:

  * a wiki
  * Google docs
  * a shared WordPress installation -- perhaps pulling in information
from different sources, such as Google docs spreadsheets, RSS feeds,
etc.

Anyone interested in helping out? ;-)

All the best,

Jonathan

[1] http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/government
[2] http://opengovernmentdata.org/form/

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg