[open-government] List of open government competitions

Mon Oct 11 20:05:38 UTC 2010

Hallo Daniel

On 12 October 2010 03:40, Daniel Dietrich <daniel.dietrich at okfn.org> wrote:

> On Oct 11, 2010, at 7:34 AM, Tim McNamara wrote:
> > I am compiling a list of competitions that support reuse of open
> government data[1]. Contributions are welcome.
>
> different people and initiatives started working on mapping OGD
> initiatives, catalogues, competitions, events.
>
> I think its pretty clear that there is a need for something like this. Lets
> try to join forces instead of to re-invent the wheel.
> So the question is: how can we cooperate and collaboratively updating a
> comprehensive list of:
>
>        • OGD initiatives (Worldwide)
>        • OGD Events (Worldwide > Calendar / Map)
>        • OGD competitions (Worldwide)
>        • OGD catalogues (Worldwide)
>

I think it's a great idea to make these data available in a single place.

My interests:

I am mostly interested in the raw data, so a spreadsheet works best for me.
Google Docs is certainly easier to edit and update than MediaWiki. I will
have time in December to contribute to a presentation layer (right now, I
must finish my thesis).

The New Zealand government is also sponsoring a competition,
http://www.mixandmash.org.nz/, and I was interesed in providing officials
some benchmarks on what level of prizes and participation to expect. I'm a
little concerned that officials have been told by open government advocates
here that there will be hundreds of wonderful applications submitted. To
make expectations on all sides more realistic, I thought I should see the
level of participation that others have.

Global site:

Perhaps we should take technical discussions off this list? Where is best?

>From a technical standpoint, I would prefer all the data to be in
Freebase.com and we can build a presentation layer with either with their
API or straight from their Acre platform. Acre is a tool, like the Google
App Engine, that enables people to create JavaScript applications for free.
I am a contributor to the Google Refine (previously Gridworks) project and
we could probably seek some support from Google for something like this. I
think that open data should in Freebase there unless there is a good reason
for it not to.

Freebase with Acre provides us with several advantages:

 - data we insert are linked with other things automatically
 - infrastructure is free and very secure
 - all data are stored as triples, meaning they link with external sources
easily
 - others can easily contribute to the code, as Acre applications are all
open source
 - no maintenance required

> Also we thought it would be cool to start thinking about start collecting
> other useful information around OGD like
>
>        • OGD use cases & success stories
>        • OGD most popular data
>        • OGD low hanging fruits (where to start? what data is easy to open)
>        • OGD best practice
>

This material will be very good to collect, Open New Zealand has tried to do
collect stories et cetera. We haven't done too well, people are too busy.

For prose, I think that we could use the CMS to collect material and use
http://www.booki.cc/ (or, we could use Scribus and do it ourselves) to
publish manuals & guides via Lulu.com. Then OKF would be able to publish
print versions of its material.

> I think that opengovernmentdata.org would be a good place for this kind of
> mapping
>
> the idea is to collaboratively collect the above mentioned information
> about ODG and to display in different formats (as single entries in a CMS,
> as a list, on a map, in a calendar, as rfd)
>
> requirements: open system that allows users to contribute and maintain
> their entries. we would propose to use drupal (out of the box, good user
> rights management, easy integration of map, cal
>
> I would love to start working on this at opengovernmentdata.org very soon.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Daniel
>

It's a great idea. I'm sorry that I can't help out with the development side
in the short term.

Regards,

Tim
@timClicks
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