[open-government] Some thoughts about Russian Open Government and Open Data vs. Open Data Protocol

[Ivan Begtin]

Hi,

Not so long time ago here in Russia president Medvedev launched government
working group dedicated to create "Open Government system". One of the
goals of this working group is to prepare Russia to join Open Government
Partnership.

It's quite strange government body with a lot of officials and business
lobbyists and it completely concentrated on social, economical,
e-government and government performance issues. Nobody from civil society
takes part in this working group, some experts including me participate in
so called "subgroups" related to different topics - innovations, social
development, IT-infrastructure and so on.

They even prepared first time presentation about it. I've published it here
- please take a look
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2519200/alldoc/rus_opengov_official.pdf

You may find that this all is very far from opendata and open government in
any meaning since our officials try to focus on government performance,
services and other non-transparency and non-opendata issues. It's full of
bureaucraticy and vendors.

I was invited to be member of the Innovations subgroup and as I see most
people (99%) of all experts doesn't ever understand what is open government
and open data.

For example today I had a long discussion with one of working groups
members who was absolutely assured that opendata is "OData" (Open Data
Protocol) developed by Microsoft. He also thinks that using OData for
exchanging data G2G or G2B even if data is disclosed and confidential - it
is "Open Data paradigm". For me it looks like lobbying specific company and
also great misunderstanding what open data is and how it differs from
protocols, standards and so on.

Even Open Government Partnership declaration is not enough to explain it
since membership in it allows countries to choose commitments in a way as
country officials want.

So right now this is serious challenge for me to convince them why open
data is important and why it should be government policy and part of any
government iniciative.

To be honest I don't really know how to change it, but I still hope that
it's possible.
So I will appreciate  if you could help me by advice.


-- 

Best Regards,
  Ivan Begtin

OpenGovData Russia - http://www.opengovdata.ru
Linked Data Lead at W3C Russia - http://w3c.org.ru
personal blog: ivan.begtin.name
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