Auckland Meeting

Had an interesting meeting tonight.

One theme was the availability of transit data - that is the real time
feeds from buses and ferries. On arrival we didn't really know what
was happening, but we soon had some good news - that the data will be
made available.

Another theme was licensing - especially around commercial use
restrictions, and what "commercial" meant. This is a general problem
with CC licenses.

We talked about risks and liabilities when it comes to providing data
that is incorrect.

There was some discussion about how the Super City will effect Open
Data; mostly a rather glum analysis, but again with some good news on
the horizon.



I would like to make a comment however about entitlement. It may be
true that as tax payer and rate payers we have already have paid for
collected data, and there are legal requirements that data and
information is made available. However, let us not beat those working
in Government and Council over the head with the legislation or take a
attitude of entitlement to data delivery.

I would rather foster a robust atmosphere of willing cooperation than
a culture of resentful fulfillment of duty. There are many in
Government that share our desire to see data increasingly opened. Many
are on this list of course. Unlike Open Source, which potentially can
be simply handed over to a community (although hardly ideal), Open
Data creates an ongoing obligation to maintain and update data. There
is however great scope for open data to minimize costs of manual
processes and have other very real business advantages.


It has been a long week - and it's only Wednesday :)

Good to see everyone, and I look forward to meeting again soonish.

On 4/08/10 10:46 PM, Peter Harrison wrote:
> I would like to make a comment however about entitlement. It may be
> true that as tax payer and rate payers we have already have paid for
> collected data, and there are legal requirements that data and
> information is made available. However, let us not beat those working
> in Government and Council over the head with the legislation or take a
> attitude of entitlement to data delivery.
>
This is a bloody good point and bears repeating on regular occasions.
The OIA/LGOIA is not a blunt instrument, or the only way to get data.
Networking, making contact and generally behaving decently to people
will get you far more than demanding.

Cheers

~mark

Hi Andrew (and the rest of the replies),

Thanks for the writeup. You pretty much said what I wanted to say so +1 to your
comments.

The funny thing is I am normally the one championing working with departments
to launch projects and get things off the ground but for some reason I seemed
to come across as unreasonable last night (inebriated transport official
aside).

I'm all for a robust system that supports professionals (aka the
http://maps.auckland.govt.nz/ site) but the real interest for me lies in all of
the other uses of the data. Sure we need super accurate data for those doing
planning and digging drains but the fact that some of the data isn't critical
shouldn't stop some data from being released on an as-is where-is basis. I'm
also confused about not being able to use cloud services to reduce distribution
costs. Amazon s3 is no different from hosting it on your own hard drive but
without the same hardware costs. The data still comes with the same license
restrictions and can still have the requirement of a click-wrap agreement. I
would be keen to investigate this issue further.

I think your commercial use description is apt as well. I'm not going to invest
large amounts of money on data that doesn't have some form of consistency but
at the same time I may start down the track, build a demo and if gains traction
then look for some form of SLA. Of course at this point I should be able to
afford that enhanced service since people are using my service. As a hacker I'm
not going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars just to play with something
and hopefully come up with something cool. The real time bus info is a great
case - I will be happy to be rate limited to some reasonable amount that will
let me grab the data I need to build an iPhone app or a lower volume website
but I would think I might have to pay for larger drains on the server. Over
time that cost should come down as bandwidth becomes cheaper.

We also need to explore the commercial use items from a licensing standpoint.
"Just use the rateable values and scrape the data" is not something that my
bosses at Zoodle would be comfortable with. Before I go anywhere near that
route I would want a clear ruling on whether that was allowed. It is clearly
against the terms of use, copyright and license agreements. This to me is
critical to fostering innovation in the apps space (using the data for
consulting seems to be OK)

Anyway - Good to meet people last night. I actually am reasonable OK to work
with ;-)

Thanks,
Glen


On 5/08/2010, at 9:25 AM, Andrew Watkins wrote:

> Yes a good meeting for the Auckland Ninjas.
>
> I was interested to see the sources of some of the conflicts.  As I
> see it there are two forces.
> 1. We want the data to be available, timely, accurate, with metadata,
> clearly licensed, etc.
> These are quality issues and things like the threat of liability make
> providers want to hold onto data until all the quality issues are
> worked out.
>
> 2. We want the data to be available, now, in a simple common format,
> good enough to get started, interesting, unencumbered
> These are value and opportunity issues.  Potential exploratory
> developers (AKA hackers) want to play (this is a good thing) to
> investigate what could be done with data.
>
> Hence we have the conflict between the 'why can't you just put a file
> on a server' and 'we need to provide a 24/7 SLA high availability
> online real time data service'
>
> Both are correct of course and one leads naturally into the other.
>
> I like the way Creative Commons have made it a lot easier to say what
> you mean when it comes to copyright.   Perhaps we need a similar set
> of off the shelf Service level Agreements, or quality statements that
> allow us to say clearly that this is an 'as is' | 'nationally
> significant' data set, updated 'when i feel like it' | 'every 5
> minutes',  and usable 'by anyone' | 'for a fee'.
>
> I think the 'commercial use' issue is arse about face.  It is really
> the commercial user rather than the supplier who needs to obtain a
> clear understanding about the data.  If I supply a nice online service
> - say telling you the UV levels around the country, for free you might
> build an iphone app for it and we are all happy.
>
> However if your customers are going to expect the data to continue to
> arrive and are paying you for that, but you don't have any continuity
> of supply agreement with us then thats bad business. You are going to
> want to come to us asking for an improved SLA for which service I
> would presume you would be willing to pay.
>
> The level of error in the data that is acceptable also depends rather
> on the use to which it is put i.e context.   So again it is the user
> who should determine what quality they want and are prepared to pay
> for.
>
> Both quality control and service continuity cost money even if the
> original data is 'free'.
>
> The final lesson - don't try to negotiate with inebriated transport
officials.
>
> -----------------------------------------
> Full text of this topic in The Open Government Ninjas:
> http://groups.open.org.nz/r/topic/3dIG7Sv0oQUgMnuT1DEhOO
>
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It was good to meet you all the other night.

One of the topics I'd been keen to discuss but which we didn't seem to get
round to is whether anyone would be interested in helping to organise a
citycamp in Auckland.

The citycamp is supposed to be a "dynamic unconference covering local Gov 2.0,
transparency, participation, and open source." There's an idea floating that
there should be a citycamp world tour and I've put my hand up to help organise
one here if there's enough interest.

More info about the initial DC version at the following link -
http://barcamp.pbworks.com/CityCampDC

Moving in to the new council it would be really interesting to talk about these
issues and what could be improved on. Obviously it would be good to give the
new organisation time to settle down and we'd need time to be able to identify
key officers to get involved.

Would anyone else be interested in helping organise this?