[open-government] Where next for the Open Government working group?

Sun Jan 27 14:59:13 UTC 2013

Hi all,

inspired by a mail form TIm Davis on the Open Development list [1] I thought asking you similar questions is a great idea!

Some of us will be heading to a meeting of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Groups next weekend (2nd/3rd Feb) to catch up with how OKF is evolving, to learn from other working groups, and to think about how the Open Government WG might develop over the coming year...

So - what should we be doing as a group in 2013?

The WG is around since 2010, has more than 800 people on its mailing list and is currently described as: 

"The Open Government Working Group is a group for everyone interested in Open Government Data. The Working Group’s purpose is to:

* Act as a central point of reference and support for people who are interested in open government data.
* Develop principles for making official information legally and technically open
* Document background and status of initiatives to make official information open in different countries
* Support development of open government data catalogues around the world, and ensure different platforms are technically interoperable."

Over the last years we have been involved in organising events like the OGDCamp in 2010 and 2011, OKFest streams and various hackathons. My feeling is that the WG has played an important role for the emerging open government data community to sharing ideas, news, knowledge and best practice. People form the WG have been involved in initiatives such as the Open Data Handbook, the Open Data Census, countless local OGD initiatives and I'm sure lots of other things I've forgotten.

We run through this mailing list, a wiki [2] and a website [3] and ad-hoc smaller groups. I'm nominally the WG coordinator, but we have no formal leaderships or committee. 

So - if you can spare 3 minutes, then there's an etherpad here: http://opengovernmentdata.okfnpad.org/ogdwg that you can edit to add your thoughts on:

	• How the group should work
	• What we should focus on in 2013
	• And how to spend the small budget OKF make available to working groups

Suggestions to the list also welcome...

All the best
Daniel

1. http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-development/2013-January/000519.html
2. http://wiki.okfn.org/Wg/government
3. http://opengovernmentdata.org/

--
Daniel Dietrich
Open Data evangelist; Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
www.okfn.org - www.opendefinition.org

www.ddie.me
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