This is a guest post by Nitai Silva of the Brazilian government’s open data team and was originally published on the Open Knowledge Brazil blog here.
Recently Brazilian government released the Kit de Dados Abertos (open data toolkit). The toolkit is made up of documents describing the process, methods and techniques for implementing an open data policy within an institution. Its goal is to both demystify the logic of opening up data and to share with public employees observed best practices that have emerged from a number of Brazilian government initiatives.
The toolkit focuses on the Plano de Dados Abertos – PDA (Open Data Plan) as the guiding instrument where commitments, agenda and policy implementation cycles in the institution are registered. We believe that making each public agency build it’s own PDA is a way to perpetuate the open data policy, making it a state policy and not just a transitory governmental action.
It is organized to facilitate the implementation of the main activities cycles that must be observed in an institution and provides links and manuals to assist in these activities. Emphasis is given to the actors/roles involved in each step and their responsibilities. It also helps to define a central person to monitor and maintain the PDA. The following diagram summarizes the macro steps of implementing an open data policy in an institution:
Processo Sistêmico de um PDA
Open data theme has been part of the Brazilian government’s agenda for over three years. Over this period, we have accomplished a number of important achievement including passing the Lei de Acesso à Informação – LAI (FOIA) (Access to Information Law), making commitments as part of our Open Government Partnership Action Plan and developing the Infraestrutura Nacional de Dados Abertos (INDA) (Open Data National Infrastructure). However, despite these accomplishments, for many public managers, open data activities remain the exclusive responsibility of the Information Technology department of their respective institution. This gap is, in many ways, the cultural heritage of the hierarchical, departmental model of carrying out public policy and is observed in many institutions.
The launch of the toolkit is the first of a series of actions prepared by the Ministry of Planning to leverage open data initiatives in federal agencies, as was defined in the Brazilian commitments in the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The next step is to conduct several tailor made workshops designed to support major agencies in the federal government in the implementation of open data.
Despite it having been built with the aim of expanding the quality and quantity of open data made available by the federal executive branch agencies, we also made a conscious effort to make the toolkit generic enough generic enough for other branches and levels of government.
About the toolkit development:
It is also noteworthy to mention that the toolkit was developed on Github. Although the Github is known as an online and distributed environment for develop software, it has already being used for co-creation of text documents for a long time, even by governments. The toolkit is still hosted there, which allows anyone to make changes and propose improvements. The invitation is open, we welcome and encourage your collaboration.
Finally I would like to thank Augusto Herrmann, Christian Miranda, Caroline Burle and Jamila Venturini for participating in the drafting of this post!
This post is by a guest poster. If you would like to write something for the Open Knowledge Foundation blog, please see the submissions page.
