[open-government] Open Government Data Standards

[James McKinney]

I'd like to announce to this group a new community project aimed at people creating civic technology and (re-)publishing government data to adopt standards for their data and APIs: the Popolo project.

http://popoloproject.com/

A major barrier to increased re-use of the growing number of open-source civic tools is the lack of agreement on how to name things. To give a very simple example: if one project's elected officials API calls a person’s name "name" and another calls it "full_name", and you're writing a Q&A platform to ask questions to these elected officials, you'll need to write an adapter for each API. Committing to a standard way of naming things would maximize interoperability, reduce wheel reinvention and make re-use that much easier.

The project's process is to (1) come up with use cases and requirements (for example, find an elected official by postal address), (2) identify existing standards addressing those use cases and requirements and (3) write specifications for how to combine and re-use those existing standards in a standard way, filling the gaps between those standards when necessary. The current spec addresses how to store/share information about people, organizations and memberships, and will soon expand to areas (e.g. districts) and events (e.g. elections).

This is a consensus-based, community-driven project, so we are eager to receive your feedback and contributions on the draft spec and for you to help define and start work on new specs with the support of the group. A W3C Open Government Community Group (CG) has been created to host the community around the specs:

http://www.w3.org/community/opengov/

Discussions happen through the CG mailing list at:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-opengov/

To be clear, the Popolo project, for which I am responsible, covers only a subset of the specs relevant to open government data. Its general scope is data relating to the legislative branch. Health inspections data, for example, covered by Yelp's LIVES spec, would be out of scope of Popolo. Within its scope, its focus is on data that often appears together and that multiple sources publish; for example, Open States publishes data on people, committees (organizations), bills (documents), votes and events, as do many other projects.

In terms of adoption and community, mySociety is working towards aligning PopIt (their people-organizations-positions web service) with Popolo. The people at the Sunlight Foundation have also been providing great feedback.

Through the CG mailing list linked above, I encourage those of you who consume data to submit new use cases and requirements, and those of you who publish data to provide feedback on the draft spec. Everyone can help decide what new specs the group should focus its efforts on, and to work on those following the rough three steps described above.

To be clear, the "Popolo" name is only tied to the spec which I am the editor of, and the Popolo spec is just one of the specs that the CG can come up with. The CG is meant to be a shared workspace for open government data spec editors.

Last few notes:

In order to support the research, development, maintenance and improvement of the Popolo spec and the outreach and facilitation of the community group, I've submitted the following to the Knight News Challenge. The News Challenge is in its "feedback" phase for the next ten days, so I look forward to your comments!

https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/legislative-open-government-data-standards/

The Popolo spec is managed on GitHub where you are welcome to report specific issues:

https://github.com/opennorth/popolo-standard/tree/gh-pages

If you will be attending Transparency Camp, please comment and vote up the proposed session about data standards at

http://transparencycamp.org/ideas/10/

If you have any questions, please let me know either on this list or the CG mailing list at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-opengov/

Best,

--
James McKinney
http://opennorth.ca/
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