Last month Rufus Pollock, Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, spoke at OpenTech 2009 in a session with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office and John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information.

His talk gave a blueprint for how to open up government data:

• Opening Up Government Data: Give it to Us Raw, Give it to Us Now (slides)
• Audio from Open Government Data session at OpenTech 2009

The talk includes the following, Opening Government Data “Rules”:

1. “Really” open: use an open license for data
2. Data first, interface second – shiny front ends come last
3. Don’t worry about formats – as long as its RAW
   • csv, rdf, xls, json … – doesn’t matter
4. Reuse existing infrastructure where possible
   • Cloud storage, ckan.net, …
5. Build demand and supply feedback into the system
   • Credit for good providers, demand info (voting) from developer and users

His talk also describes a vision for how UK government data will be discovered, stored, requested and reused:

Links to other documentation from talks at Open Tech 2009 are available here!

Related posts:

1. Opening up local government data? Openly Local is a recently launched “first draft of getting hold of and making accessible local government data in a consistent and useful form”. There is generally a lot of support for open data from central government in the UK...
2. Speaking at OpenTech 2009 Tomorrow I’ll be talking at OpenTech 2009 in a session on “Open Government Data” with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office and John Sheridan of OPSI. With the recent, and very welcome, news on opening up government data both here...
3. What do you think about open government data in Australia? Back in June the Australian Minister for Finance announced a new Government 2.0 Taskforce. Part of the work of this new taskforce includes: increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation...