Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data"

Hi, all. I'm sorry I haven't had the time to say much here, though I've 
tried to watch the progress. Over the last several months I've been 
writing an essay-

   Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data"
   http://razor.occams.info/pubdocs/opendataciviccapital.html

-which addresses a small portion of the issues that have come up in this 
group, so I thought I would share it here. The motivation to write this 
started at Transparency Camp [1] a few months ago, and at the end of the 
conference Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat, and later I, decided to take on 
the project of bringing together a repository of best-practices guides 
for technology’s role in an open government. (We have a wiki page for 
the project [2] which lists some of the guides we’d like to see written.)

The goal of Open Data is Civic Capital was 1) to motivate why open 
government data isn’t just an ideological issue but actually makes 
society more powerful, and can really make the world a better place, and 
2) to outline some suggested priorities and recommendations for open 
government data, drawing on the recommendations of a number of past 
groups. The essay begins:

     “Creating a well-informed public is a core value of representative 
government. It is a prerequisite for ensuring the best representatives 
are elected and a crucial component of government oversight—as well as 
being important in areas well beyond civics. This document speaks to why 
public government data (also called ‘public sector information’) is a 
valuable resource to society if put on the Web and shared freely with 
the public, and discusses how to go about doing it. We discuss 
technological considerations and end with sixteen guiding principles for 
best practices in open government data.”

Hopefully you find this useful/informative (as opposed to spam :-).

[1] http://transparencycamp.org/
[2] http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/Best_Practices

-- 
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation!  Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)

Received on Tuesday, 19 May 2009 17:38:35 UTC