All posts in the topic defining open, data, etc. (Short link)
Summary
- There are 5 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Glen Barnes at 2009 Jun 19 08:28 NZST
On 16/06/2009, at 8:50 PM, <email obscured> wrote: > 1. Do we all agree on > http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OpenDataPrinciples > If not why not? > At the very least, it would be good to link to these, and if people > think > that NZ might want something different, let's begin the discussion... I'm going to approach this a little differently. I'm focused on shipping things that make a difference, so I look at things in terms of projects. We might have a project to define open data. In which case we'd have a reason for doing it, an audience for it, and it'd be something we shipped because it'd make a difference. Full speed ahead, cap'n. However, I'm nervous about starting a discussion on "what is open data" without a goal for it. This kind of conversation can be long and detailed, and would dilute our efforts to ship things. There might be a good reason for such a discussion, in which case I'd love to have it, but I haven't seen that reason posted yet. Does this make sense? I'm writing up my intro for the list, and that will hopefully give more context for where I'm coming from.
On 2009-06-17, at 1118, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> However, I'm nervous about starting a discussion on "what is open
> data" without a goal for it. This kind of conversation can be long
> and detailed, and would dilute our efforts to ship things.
Perhaps that is where my previous suggestion of a short and succinct
guide would come into play. We use that as a tool for communicating
"what open data is", and could easily be done in parallel to shipping
things. A guide is just a product as well, it also needs to be scoped
and constrained to produce the product. Having a goal of releasing a
'product' in this context would help focus discussion and create a
deliverable product.
Cheers Gav
On 17/06/2009, at 11:52 AM, Gavin Treadgold wrote:
> Perhaps that is where my previous suggestion of a short and succinct
> guide would come into play. We use that as a tool for communicating
> "what open data is", and could easily be done in parallel to shipping
> things.
My experience with the new government is that it would be more useful
to position such a document as "what the industry wants from
government" than it would be to phrase it as "our ideologically pure
and perfect demands".
Perhaps such a work would be to collect from map hackers, geeks,
activists, etc., a list of the things that make the data suitable for
their needs (and why). I'm reasonably sure there's a very large
overlap between the clauses in "open data" definitions and the list of
things that industry need from government data. If you wanted to
reflect that back to government, I suspect that'd be a more useful
positioning than "here's our interpretation of an abstract term".
On 2009-06-18, at 0946, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> My experience with the new government is that it would be more
> useful to position such a document as "what the industry wants from
> government" than it would be to phrase it as "our ideologically pure
> and perfect demands"... I suspect that'd be a more useful
> positioning than "here's our interpretation of an abstract term".
I don't think I said it should be an ideologically pure manifesto, I
would want it to be a hands-on, this is how you release it, this is
what citizens, organisations and industry want, document. I'm all for
practical, and happy to leave the ideology to other approaches (for
those that are interested). I don't want us to be wasting government's
time with ideology, we need to work closely on the real benefits.
This is where building off the research from the likes of AU and the
upcoming NZ reports on the economic value of open geospatial data come
into play. Having this stuff open is going to help the countries
productivity, economy and society.
Cheers Gav
OK. I've created a page on the Wiki: http://opengovt.wikia.com/wiki/WIP_Page_for_How_to_Publish_Open_Data_Page_on_the_Catalogue This replaces my Google Doc which wasn't going to work for what we wanted (fail early and often...) This is to be a *practical* hands on to how data should be released. For each point we need a basic description of what it means and why it is important. Then we will have a page for each section giving practical examples of how to implement the 'feature'. For example we want the data to be free and we can outline why but sometimes it is not so the practical solution to that would be to make it easy to pay and to also look for lower cost ways to disseminate the data (we could suggest Amazon s3 for large datasets, using an online payment system instead of having to call, email anyone) I'm going offline for a day or so to work on my start-up which needs some attention so have fun.