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!