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”:
- “Really” open: use an open license for data
- Data first, interface second – shiny front ends come last
- Don’t worry about formats – as long as its RAW
- csv, rdf, xls, json … – doesn’t matter
- Reuse existing infrastructure where possible
- Cloud storage, ckan.net, …
- 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!
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
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