[open-government] Draft strategy for the Open Government Data working group

Wed Apr 3 19:31:13 UTC 2013

Hi all,

Last week a couple of us got together to chat about potential ways to grow
this group, to ensure key projects are being supported and to better
leverage and support the incredible work of this community for everyone's
benefit.

I met with Andrew Stott, Rufus Pollock, Daniel Dietrich & Christian Villum
and below are the notes from the chat for broader discussion in the group.

On one hand, we could just leave this as a mailing list that people
occasionally use, but we felt that a little community development would be
useful to help us all in our personal and professional open data work :)
See what you think. We wanted to get the best balance of supporting
community initiatives where appropriate (such as the data census) and
supporting existing work of people who could report their progress to the
group on a semi regular basis to more effectively share and leverage the
broader expertise of this community. We are completely open to alternative
paths.

Pia|Andrew|Christian|Daniel - Happy to be Head Cat Wranglers

Our suggested approach to pursuing a program of work that is mutually
beneficial for the open data community:

1) For community projects that the group agrees should be supported and
pursued (such as  the data census) - a project lead is identified and they
engage the rest of the group where required to progress the project. For
instance, a 3 hour sprint to analyse data, etc.

2) Where Working Group members are pursing work independently of the group
that would be of benefit, they could report back to the group, collaborate
with members where relevant/appropriate, and then everyone can contribute
to and leverage common efforts.

We also thought it would be useful to make the monthly meetings more
targeted and specifically useful for folk to attend. So we are going to
experiment with having two components to the meeting:

   1. Project leads reporting to the group on their progress - for the
   meeting on the 4th, we'll discuss the structure above, the community
   projects people want to support, and the meeting structure.
   2. A speaker for each meeting. For this months meeting I will present
   about the status and progress of open data in Australia. As the person now
   responsible for data.gov.au and who has been involved in the Australian
   Gov 2.0 agenda since it started, I have a reasonable understanding of
   situation here :) You can see what I do at http://pipka.org if you want
   a background.

Potential (Suggested) community projects:

   - Open Data Census
   - Coordination of open data content at Open Knowledge Conference
   - Facilitate Monthly meetings - including a monthly speaker, support for
   project leads, correspondence about meetings
   - A monthly OGD Bulletin - to collate links from the month, case study
   from the monthly meeting speaker, overview of progress reports from the
   project leads

Examples of potential independent projects:

   - Case studies across a diverse range of data types and use cases - Pia
   Waugh (Australia)
   Project Description: To assist in making the case to open data and
   mitigate the challenge of "what is the value". With such case studies we
   can respond to this issue with "here is a case study similar to our
   situation, and here are the benefits therein". This was identified in
   Australia/NZ as a way to progress opening government datasets without
   lengthy delays. It'd be good to collate such case studies around the world
   into a single place (even just a bunch of links!) so we can all have them
   in our back pocket when we meet resistance up the chain :) We will share
   our work as it progresses and are working closely with NZ on this.
   - Technical toolkit for publishers
   - Government policy templates
   - Government Hackfests

Cheers and I look forward to contributing more to this group.

Pia Waugh
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