Re: follow on notes from this morning

Paola--

Great write up and suggestions.  Thanks for your ongoing participation and these really good points.

--Jeanne

**********************************************************
Jeanne Holm
Evangelist, Data.gov
U.S. General Services Administration
Cell: (818) 434-5037
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn: JeanneHolm
**********************************************************

From: Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com<mailto:paola.dimaio@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: "paoladimaio10@googlemail.com<mailto:paoladimaio10@googlemail.com>" <paoladimaio10@googlemail.com<mailto:paoladimaio10@googlemail.com>>
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:50:03 -0700
To: "eGov IG (Public)" <public-egov-ig@w3.org<mailto:public-egov-ig@w3.org>>
Subject: 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