Sprint for Brazilian data catalogue Dados.gov.br

The following guest post is from Augusto Herrmann, Christian Miranda and Nitai Bezerra, from the Open Data team at the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management. They are all members of the Open Knowledge Foudation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.

We are a team of three people working on open data at the Brazilian federal government. We are considering using CKAN as a catalogue for our own Dados.gov.br!

One of our team members, Augusto Herrmann, is already responsible for the Brazilian CKAN community instance and the Brazilian Portuguese translation of the CKAN software. So he has already some experience as a CKAN user.

Tomorrow (Friday 10th June), we’ll be doing our first development sprint. The sprint, as all of our planning (more on that on a later post coming soon), is open for public participation. We are not set on the full requirements yet (that will be the first part of the sprint), but we want, at least:

a data catalogue (our main choice for this is CKAN)
user feedback channels (ideas, requests, dataset ratings?)
a blog for news posting
a user interface

One idea is to develop an user interface and communicate with the CKAN instance by the CKAN API. This would give us some more flexibility on the interface, and would run it independently from the CKAN instance. Another idea is to use the ckanext-wordpresser extension, and embed the blog postings inside the CKAN interface itself.

Since we are not familiar with the software code (Augusto is an experienced user, but is not yet familiar with the CKAN code), we’re look for people to help us out!

What do you think we should do? What do you think the new Brazilian data catalogue should look like? Do you have any ideas for features that you think it should have? We’d love to hear from you at our planning/coding sprint for the new Brazilian data catalogue!

We’ll be on the IRC channel #ckan at irc.oftc.net (you can connect using your web browser here) at 0800-1800 Brazilian local time, which is 1200-2200 UK time. To find out what time this is in your time zone, click here. We look forward to seeing some of you there!