Jason Hare's Data Management Blog

A posting below concerning #socrata and the development of an #opendatastandard and the merging of Socrata's GitHub posting with the standard being developed at the OKF: http://blog.opennorth.ca/2012/11/22/open-data-standards/ Will Pugh (Socrata): I appreciate the conversations. I think there are a few places this blog missed the mark, but the issue of trading off speed for effective governance is a reasonable discussion. The blog does not have a place to comment, so I'll respond here (and possibly a later blog post). The Government Linked Data Working Group has done a good job in defining a number of the vocabularies for catalogs and linked data, however, in terms of last mile standards in terms of how catalogs synchronize and federate with each other, these are a good starting point but not enough. Both the open-data-standards initiative as well as the spec.datacatalogs.org initiative start where the Government Linked Data Working Group and DCAT left off. They are focussed o...

(OGD Toolkit), designed to provide staff at the World Bank and in country governments a basic set of resources for initiating and developing an open data program. The toolkit is a “work in progress” which we expect to revise and improve as we receive your feedback and real-world experience. http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/how-can-the-open-government-data-toolkit-help-you

Re-sharing from a re-share by + Rob Stocker . Those articles from the UK on open data policy are indeed well written. Rob Stocker originally shared this post : http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/03/welcome-to-the-open-data-user-group/index.htm Welcome to the Open Data User Group » Back in October I wrote about a UK government consultation on the subject of the proposed Public Data Corporation. The government has now responded with one of its well-written documents [pdf].

Sadly- little is done in the way of municipal or government web design. Some forward efforts have been made. I look to the City of Calgary and Reinvent NYC as examples of moving in the right direction. Recently, I left the Durham Public Schools system to work for the City of Raleigh as the Open Data Program Manager. At DPS we started the move from organizationally driven websites toward a design that is starting to be based on community feedback and analytics. Discussing the issue with Robin McCoy from DPS yesterday I noted that the winning design violated several usability heuristic principles. I was expecting push-back. Instead I got a refreshing "write it up". I helped DPS on their redesign effort as part of the last project for a system to which I had given 7 years of my career. Now working in Open Data I see a chance to finally build interfaces based on solid analytics. Citizen engagement is measurable and the return on Open Data investment can only be realized through a...

  Part of the discussion with Open Ireland Thursday will be related to +Gavin Starks' comments from the ODI. CEO of Open Data Institute: we need to make open data non-threatening (Wired UK) » The disruptive power of open data needn't be seen as a threat to companies and government agencies, argued Gavin Starks, chief executive of the Open Data Institute.

One of the positive take-aways I got from the trip to Asheville, NC with my colleague, Chad Foley, is that any data effort can start small. The World Bank Blog also advocates this. The other take away is we need to think about the questions we want to posit to our data. Sometimes looking at data and thinking about data can be overwhelming. Like any information project, the first question I like to ask is "Why are we doing this?". The second is "what story or narrative does this data tell us?". Sometimes there are several narratives embedded within a dataset or a bigger narrative in a federated dataset. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach to looking at the data within any organization usually yields the best narratives. http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/big-data-you-can-start-small

Below is a collection of Open data initiatives focused on economic drivers to make a business case for an open data initiative. I sent this list to a colleague yesterday in response to a discussion on federating data between my municipality and the state government. Denmark This is a link to a blog posting and in the blog posting is a link to Denmark’s ROI report on cost savings since implementing Open Data- the caveat is I feel the ROI data is at a very high level (50k foot level) without breaking it down into enough specifics: http://inferringvalue.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/open-government-data-report-on-denmarks-egovernment-strategy-2011-2015/ Australia In 2011 ANDS (Australian National Data Service) commissioned the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University to examine the costs and benefits of public sector organizations making their data (Public Sector Information or PSI) freely available. The study was undertaken by Professor John Houghton, a prominent economis...