Deprecation of the Microsoft Open Government Data Initiative is a Good Thing

-


 


The Open Government Partnership Summit Banner


In May of this year, Asian and European countries met for the regional Open Government Partnership summits to once again discuss transparency and open government. In light of the session tracks that were presented I am evaluating some of the technologies of the past and how there has been a welcome and fundamental shift from Open Government and Open Data being ambiguously linked toward the separation of the two in more current thinking and in technology approaches.


Most notably, the deprecation of Microsoft's Open Government Data Initiative platform is a positive sign of the times that the government community is becoming aware of the danger of open government and open data linking.


Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson discussed the OGP in "The New Ambiguity of Open Government" (Princeton CITP/Yale ISP Working Paper).
"The Open Government Declaration is broad approach toward 'openness,' as signatories commit to 'seeking ways to make their governments more transparent, responsive, accountable, and effective.' In addition to transparency and accountability, OGP member countries promise to 'uphold the value of openness in our engagement with citi­zens to improve services, manage public resources, promote innovation, and create safer communities.' Thus, the stated goals of the OGP include making gov­ernments both more efficient and more accountable, and it remains to be seen how much focus each of these disparate goals will receive. By casting a wide net, the OGP has received the 'open government' pledges of more than 55 countries." (2012)
In response Microsoft, in 2009, released an “Open Government Data Initiative,” which promotes the use of Microsoft’s Windows Azure online platform as a tech­nol­ogical underpinning for open data efforts. Microsoft has an incentive to sell open data technologies for the broadest range of governmental uses; their decision to brand their efforts in terms of “open government” is powerful evidence of how vague the term can become.


The basic premise of open data as open government has created ambiguity within Civil Society Organizations that belong to the Open Government Partnership. Since 2011, there has been a large de-emphasis on open data being linked to open government. Newer technologies like CKAN, Socrata and Open Data Soft have embraced a more prescriptive approach to open data. The idea is now that open data is a strategic asset or “infrastructure” to be used by accountability and transparency groups that are separate from open data.


The OGDI acronym itself is an outdated concept of tying government transparency to open data. The OGP itself recognizes this and has recommended a separation in commitment by member countries between e-government, open government and open data. In recent summit meeting in both London, 2013 and in the Bali, Dublin summits of 2014, a separation of open data from open government was evident from the session tracks presented during the international and regional summits.


Aside from the philosophical differences of OGDI from the more modern technology platforms, there are technical limitations within the OGDI platform. OGDI, while open source, is limited to Microsoft Azure cloud hosting and is indeed only available as a platform plugin once an Azure account has been created. This runs counter to the idea of a data platform being loosely coupled to a hosting technology.


"Open Data" should be free from technological restraints and should be represented by a platform that conforms with post 2011 open data thinking and strategy. By disambiguating open data from open government, governments can be more transparent with both sides of their OGP commitments and address any open data commitment head-on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Podcast: Open Data Discussions with Anthony Fung

-
Image
A look back at Virginia’s 4 years of data innovation with Anthony Fung, Deputy Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia  Welcome to the OpenDataSoft Leadership Podcast Series, “Open Data Discussions”. Each month, Jason Hare, our Open Data Evangelist, features a different open data program around the country to discuss what has made it successful. These examples will provide insights and strategies that you can implement in your own city. We had the pleasure of welcoming Anthony Fung, Deputy Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia for the fifth podcast in our series. Anthony discussed various subjects, including: What role does open data play in policymaking at the state level in Virginia? Does his department work on ensuring open data quality? What are some of the steps he makes in ensuring sound data governance? How did Virginia come up with this technology and engagement solutions?  How, for exampl...
Read more

WHITE HOUSE OPEN DATA INNOVATION SUMMIT - WHAT I SAID, WHAT I MEANT TO SAY

-
Image
+OpenDataSoft participated in the celebration that was 8 years in the making at the White House. Yesterday, for the first time, the White House held the 2016 Open Data Innovation Summit.  I work for OpenDataSoft as the Open Data Evangelist. I was asked to introduce the White House Agenda and then to speak on Civic Innovation regarding Open Data. What I said and what I wanted to say were different. The event was full of excitement and also of reflection Megan Smith and Tony Scott kicked off the event touting the 200k datasets that had been released through Data.Gov. Certainly this is refreshing from even a decade ago when serious effort and even lawsuits were required to make data available to the public. That all was not good and could be better was brought up by +Alex Howard from the Sunlight Foundation. Alex noted that HTML and PDFs were counted among the "datasets" being released. Note that while HTML and PDFs are indeed 1 star ...
Read more

Open Data Licensing

-
Image
Everything you wanted to know but you were afraid to ask. Making data open and available is not just about choosing a format or having an API. A poor choice in your license can prevent people from using them. A traditional open license reassures potential users that their work on the data will be useful in the long run. So, what license should you pick for your data to be broadly used? There are a few things to consider. Choosing a license for your open data can usually be one of the biggest challenges for an open data project. There are plenty of licenses available for your data. Choosing one mostly depends on the usage and reach you want to give to your project. CHOOSE A LICENSE: BASED ON NATIONAL, INTERNATIONAL AND LOCAL STATUTES IN ADDITION TO REUSE It should be noted that different parts of the world use data licensing terms differently. In the US, works in the “public domain” are works are not covered by intellectual property rights, such as copyright. The copyright mig...
Read more