follow on notes from this morning

Greetings all

it was good to participate remotely in the meeting today and meeting you all

May not be able to join afternoon or tomorrow, so just a few thoughts for
the table, please  consider and pass on as you see fit

- great that participation to this WG is open to the public, so that this
forum
may constitute itself as *super partes* public advisory, or even authority

- anyone who interacts with governments knows the score: undecided
bunch,turning around
at every electoral wind change, in desperate need of advice, but don't
trust anyone , end up
prey of unscrupulous ineffective consultants hired via obscure supply
chains etc

- if the work of this group is professional enough, could become important
technical expert
impartial voice to inform policy makers

- no data is useless, other than poorly structured a inadequately modelled
data, from which no useful insights can be gathered

- if it's true that publishing proactively would reduce the risk of FOI
bottlenecks, then it should be mandated by legislation. I have some
experience of FOI requests in the UK, and it is obvious, as I was saying on
IRC, that the system is currently designed to trickle information. It is
not cost effective to deal with requests one by one, since requests cannot
be scaled up economically
and sustainably

- to scale up information publication sustainably, organisations should
make all the data (suitably anonymised=masked) available by default, that
means transparent databases, with person data and other sensitive fields
hidden from public view. Also, all transactions, and discussions and
decisions pertaining to the transactions supported by provenance data.

- the public should be able to interact with the data not only by querying
it meaningfully, but also
by annotating it, exporting to mesh it etc, and providing input into it

- for data to be queried economically, it must be structured properly this
fundamentally means have it organised in meaningful classes/categories. of
course even unstructured data can be parsed and tagged, but thats an added
cost. Governments should be supported in the effort of modelling knowledge
sharing schemas to guide the design of their dbases and IT systems so that
its querying and manipulation can be done with least possible cost. economy
 and financial considerations (costs) will impact the long term viability
of the open data movement with all the
possible consequences

- we should identify  and study good examples of organisations that publish
proactive data and by so doing reduce FOI admin costs, write up good
practice to make the case, then take things from there

Keep up the good work-
California sounds a good place to be!

Til next

PDM