[open-government] Decentralized Open Data (Was: Re: 1st. April joke?)

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hi,

(I'm cross-posting this to CKAN discuss list as well, as it is CKAN related)

Bad news for sure. while I can not comment on the government/relationships part, as I am not "at home" in that area, I was thinking about "What can we as an international community do" from technology perspective and from available resources. Maybe not directly for saving the data in data.gov but rather to prevent similar situations in other countries.

I think that decentralized CKAN network (with storage) is way to go: multiple CKAN instances owned by government sectors/regions/companies/NGOs. It is the same situation as with large state-owned/state-supported monopolies and multiple private-owned, smaller companies. The later provides more stability from economic system perspective.

Short presentation:

	http://www.slideshare.net/Stiivi/open-data-decentralisation

Situation:

- data.gov: Meta-CKAN or CKAN aggregator (there might be more)
- data.foo.gov: CKAN instance for gov. organisation "foo"
- data.bar.org: CKAN instance for any other org "bar"
...

some CKAN instances might know about their "friended" instances and share/sync catalogues. CKAN hubs/aggregators will have many many "friends".

State stops funding data.gov? No problem: we just reroute the data from other catalogues and data stores.

I can imagine similar situation in Slovakia to happen - this government might want to introduce data.gov, however the next one might stop funding it.

SUMMARY: Decentralizing raw data storage and encouraging gov/non-gov/private organisations to have their own CKAN instances will create more stable raw open data ecosystem.

What do you think?

Stefan Urbanek


On 1.4.2011, at 15:01, Daniel Dietrich wrote:

> John,
> 
> this is *really* bad news.
> 
> What can we as an international community do?
> 
> Regards
> Daniel
> 
> On 01.04.2011, at 14:34, John Wonderlich wrote:
> 
>> Hi, unfortunately this is not a joke.
>> 
>> John
>> 
>> On Friday, April 1, 2011, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou <b.ooghe at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I guess I missed this article from a week ago :
>>> http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/03/23/transparency-technopocalypse-proposed-congressional-budgets-slash-funding-for-data-transparency/
>>> 
>>> This would be such a terrible step backwards, and such a wrong signal
>>> to all countries who start considering openness...
>>> 
>>> Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 10:08, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou <b.ooghe at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I read everywhere as an answer that sunlight has been discussing it
>>>> for a week but I'm following most of their rss and haven't read about
>>>> it before yesterday eveing.
>>>> Is this a really well organised joke?
>>>> This webpage is seriously frightening :
>>>> http://sunlightfoundation.com/savethedata/
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 2011/4/1 Ton Zijlstra <ton.zijlstra at gmail.com>:
>>>>> Sunlight foundation has been discussing this for a week already. Hope it is
>>>>> a joke.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Op 1 apr. 2011 09:57 schreef "Daniel Dietrich" <daniel.dietrich at okfn.org>
>>>>> het volgende:
>>>>>> Dear all,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> is this a 1st April joke?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> http://flowingdata.com/2011/03/31/data-gov-and-other-transparency-sites-to-be-shut-down-due-budget-cuts/
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Regards
>>>>>> Daniel
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> open-government mailing list
>>>>>> open-government at lists.okfn.org
>>>>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> open-government mailing list
>>>>> open-government at lists.okfn.org
>>>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
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>>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
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Stefan Urbanek
freelance consultant, analyst

knowerce
http://www.knowerce.sk