[open-government] Software for Open Data : Drupal?

Wed Sep 14 15:29:23 UTC 2011

Hi Mark / Brian

It would seem very timely to do another document, that looks at the
relationship between Cloud and FLOSS.

One of the primary challenges that holds back its adoption is quite simply
it's difficult to adopt. Commercial software comes with a lot of
hand-holding that makes it easy to use and adopt, that FLOSS does not.

Cloud packages all of this value add into a utility service, making any
software whether it's FLOSS or not, more accessible to non-technical
users.

This is especially important since the push for 'Shared Services' is about
finding ways of cutting costs, and I believe this context will magnify the
value of Cloud. Even more so if it offers FLOSS as a utility.

I've started the ball rolling in this first white paper:

http://cloudbestpractices.net/2011/09/14/shared-services-canada/

We could co-author a series. You'll see it covers Open Data too.

Neil.

> From Mark Perry
>
>
> Dear Open Govt. Colleagues
>
> For the last couple of years I've been working on seeing how interested
> the Can Govt. departments are in Open Source solutions, and some of the
> results you can find in the two papers here:
> <http://ssrn.com/author=10510> http://ssrn.com/author=10510 "FLOSS as a
> Public Policy Choice" and "FLOSS for the Canadian Public Sector..." (one
> is an extended version of the other, I forget which is which). Apart from
> some individuals, I've had little sucess in convincing the Can Fed. Public
> Sector to engage in anything along these lines. I hope that others are
> more effective.
>
> atb
>
> Mark
>
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Associate Dean  Mark Perry (Research, Graduate Studies, Operations)
> IBM Center for Advanced Studies Faculty Fellow
> Faculty of Law
> A-P Faculty of Science,  Computer Science
> University of Western Ontario
> London, Ontario, N6A 5B7, Canada<x-apple-data-detectors://1>
> <http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~markp>http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~markp
> <http://www.law.uwo.ca/>http://www.law.uwo.ca/
> View some of my research on my SSRN Author page:
> <http://ssrn.com/author=10510> http://ssrn.com/author=10510
>
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> <<
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On 13/09/2011, at 1:26 AM, "Rufus Pollock"
> <rufus.pollock at okfn.org<mailto:rufus.pollock at okfn.org>> wrote:
>
> On 12 September 2011 11:38, Neil McEvoy
> <neil at mcevoy.biz<mailto:neil at mcevoy.biz>> wrote:
>
> Thanks Rufus, this seems to be exactly what's needed.
>
> My goal is to host it locally in Canada, so that it's entirely tailored
> for the government's needs here. I presume it's quite straight forward to
> install and operate?
>
> Yes, it's straightforward to deploy and is open source (obviously!).
> In fact there was a deployment done (with integration with Drupal)
> early last year for this site:
>
> <http://www.datadotgc.ca/>
>
> Once installed, is it possible to simply start contacting Government
> agencies and offering them a facility to integrate and host their data in
> this environment?
>
> Yes.
>
> I presume most of the heavy lifting would be in identifying, extracting
> and transforming the data...
>
> Yes, that's the hardest part of it -- particularly because data is
> very variable (geodata isn't the same as chemical data, data from
> excel files may be handled differently from linked data or ESRI shape
> files etc).
>
> Rufus
>
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>

-- 
Neil McEvoy
Founder
Cloud Best Practices Network
http://mcevoy.biz