Jason Hare's Data Management Blog

  The Context of CX This month has been a roller coaster of travel, events and awards. I flew home from the  National League of Cities in Seattle  reflecting upon where Open Raleigh will be going in five years and more importantly, next year. Several bloggers have captured several themes I have been mulling  over and I would like to synthesize them into a buzzword I heard coined the other day "the Citizen Experience" or CX. Now this word was mentioned by  Bonner Gaylord in his recent blog article . A search on Bing brings up  Jennifer Pahlka  using the phrase in August 2012. There is now a center of citizen experience. Thinking about CX and open data in the world I live in is quite normal. As a former UX designer and webbie I have built my fair share of interfaces. Reading the context of Councilman Gaylord's definition plays into what other thought leaders within open data and civic engagement have been discussing. It is about the citizen at the end of...

  Help Build the New Open Raleigh Originally posted to: http://reid.serozi.com/ Raleigh's Open Data Portal Data.RaleighNC.gov , which allows access to city data sets in open and standard ways for non-technical and tech savvy users is undergoing a major site redesign. The new design will require individual data set clean-up, which will require updating all of the 300 data sets to make sure the metadata is updated. Jason Hare, City of Raleigh’s Open Data Program Manager, reached out to the Code for Raleigh Brigade for assistance to help complete the job. Hare said, “Involving citizens in crowd sourcing civic engagement initiatives like Open Raleigh is at the heart of what the program is about.” Join the Code for Raleigh Brigade as we support the City of Raleigh organize hundreds of data sets. Be involved in the City’s Open Raleigh Portal and make an impact in your city. No coding skills required. Just mad civic-minded organization skills needed. The Details When: Thursday, December 5...

  Jonathan Feldman I’m just returning from a lightning talk and World Cafe session at the National League of Cities Congress of Cities in Seattle, and thought it would be helpful to jot down some thoughts while they’re fresh in my mind. The theme of the session was, “Engaging Residents in Solutions: Using Data and Technology to Improve Local Government.” I was honored to be among some distinguished folks. Harvard Kennedy School’s Stephen Goldsmith stole the show with the best line of the conference when an audience member asked “to what extent should government official’s emails be open?” Goldsmith quipped, “He’s really asking ‘how much democracy can you tolerate?’ “ Ha! Alisha Green , a policy associate with the Sunlight Foundation , introduced the audience to the Foundation’s open data policy guidelines . Jeanne Holm , an evangelist with Data.gov, described cities.data.gov , which federates city data. Pretty cool. And Scott Resnick, a forward-thinking city councilman in Madison...

  From Mark Wainwright I was interested to read your blog post about ODIs, the OGP and open data. It's good to know that people are on the back of the governments about ensuring they follow through with their Open Data commitments. From Jason Hare I welcome Mark's comments as well as those from the OKFN. Where I have represented the OKFN at large I have replaced that wording with OKFN Ireland. My comments are my own and do not reflect the views of any organization or company with which I am affiliated. I look forward to meeting my open data colleagues for a lively discussion on topics relating to the opening of government data. I am hoping the subject centers around governance rather than technology. Good policy always triumphs over technology. MARK'S COMMENT 1: "A couple of things you said surprised me. I don't know that, in the UK at least, the ODI is a watchdog of the government's transparency portal. For sure the ODI are doing great work - I'm just not ...

  National and regional nodes of the Open Data Institute (@UKODI) must be established in every Open Government Partnership member country. With the  ODI Summit  and the  OGP Summit  occurring during the same week in London at the end of October, I have been thinking about the role the ODI must play in Open Government Data. Let's have a few definitions and a little backstory to the ODI, the OGP and the current state of Open Government Data. Why do we need governance? We are now closing in on the 5th year of a vigorous world wide movement to open data within government. There have been some successes and some mainstreaming. The adoption of open data by default with Whitehouse Memorandum M13-13, the G8 Charter on Open Data and certainly 59 countries agreeing to participate internationally as OGP members are signs that we are moving in the right direction. There is room for improvement. The OGP requirements leave room for interpretation, the Whitehouse has not follo...

  Friday, 27th September 2013:  A CKAN hackathon takes place tomorrow ( Saturday ,  28th September ) at TCube in Dublin bringing together IT specialists, political representatives and members of the public with an interest in making data open.    Developers, designers, journalists, academics, policy makers, creative thinkers, civil servants, entrepreneurs and interested parties are invited to the event which aims to provide the people of Ireland with a single access point to the information collected by their government by deploying a Central Open Data Portal.  Open, usable and available knowledge will lead to greater transparency for Irish citizens and accountability from Irish representatives.  Hackathon organizer and Ambassador for Ireland of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Denis Parfenov, commented: "We strongly believe that comprehensive and meaningful information has the potential to empower better evidence based decision-making for all of us: abo...

The first day of the training course Open Data in Practice in the Open Data Institute. The first day included 8 hours with short breaks for coffee. Our class of 12 people listened to a few lectures and learned about the world of open data (Discovering Data on the Web). The lectures led by David Tarrant of the University of Southampton were lively and moved along at a brisk pace. The format of the presentation was accessible and an accommodating way to learn about open data, the evolution of the web, data formats, why and where these formats are used. Dave also delivered a separate lecture on related data and the RDF-model of data. This was a much more interesting area of open data. I will organize and publish my thoughts and notes I made ​​during the class. Amazingly, our group included several people I have known only virtually. One of these virtual friends was Jason Hare, who I met on the Internet a few months ago on the basis of open data. He heads a wonderful project on open data o...