Jason Hare's Data Management Blog

+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 ...

OPEN DATA PANEL TO BE FEATURED WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26 SEPTEMBER 26, 2016 Open Data will be a featured panel discussion at the All Things Open conference this year. With a new administration set to transition into place in January and multiple new initiatives starting at both the state and federal levels, the topic has never been more important.  The session, which will take place Wednesday, October 26 at 1:30 pm ET,  will feature some of the foremost experts in the world. The panel will be moderated by OpenDataSoft's Open Data Evangelist, Jason Hare. Topics to be discussed will include: The New Open Data Transition Report Future opportunities for Open Data at the local and federal levels with the DATA Act How the Open Data landscape is evolving, particularly through Demand Driven Open Data (DDOD) Future opportunities in open data at the Federal and local levels How the panel’s insights can...

The Yu and Robinson article "The New Ambiguity of 'Open Government'" was something I read a few years ago. I disagree that the edge of open government is going away. Yes there are data sets being published that have nothing to do with accountability. Yes there are open data initiatives that stand up a few data sets and call it "open". This does not mean that all or most open data professionals do this. This whole line of "government versus the people" is one of the reasons Public Sector Agencies (PSA's) have trouble getting open data initiatives launched in the first place. The main issue is the disconnect between PSAs and the private sector. There is little, if any, discussion on the value-add of releasing these data. This is not purely a government issue. Private sector, with a few shining exceptions (BuildingEye for example) have shied away from using or even trying to ...

Register Now! WEBINAR - TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4TH 2016 1:00 P.M. NEW YORK CITY As an Open Data administrator, project manager, or reuser, you may face three main problems that could be preventing the success of your program: Platform  ease-of-use  for publishers and reusers Flexibility and control  of the platform Limited  technical capacities  of the platform Join us as we demonstrate to you how you can use the OpenDataSoft solution to take your Open Data program to the next level. We will run a demo of the product to show you how you can put data online quickly and how you can use OpenDataSoft Open Source widgets and pages to build the reuses that your community wants.  Featuring: Franck Carassus  Chief Operating Officer,  OpenDataSoft Ian Henshaw  Business Development Manager - North America,  OpenDataSoft Jason Hare  Open Data Evange...

Metadata. You may have heard the term before, and may have asked yourself either “what is metadata” or “why is it as important as data?” This article will be an attempt to clear up those two subjects. As this can often be quite dense, let’s jump right in! Metadata can be explained in a few ways: Data that provide  information about other data . Metadata  summarizes basic information about data , making finding & working with particular instances of data easier. Metadata  can be created manually  to be more accurate, or automatically and contain more basic information. In short, metadata are important. I like to answer this “what is metadata” question as such: metadata are a shorthand representation of the data to which they refer. If we use analogies, we can think of metadata as references to data. Think about the last time you searched Google. That search started with the metadata you had in yo...

I didn't want to be vain and write a piece about why I decided to not pursue open data any further. I waited until someone else's reason matched mine. That someone was Mike Bracken! Mike Bracken, whom I respect greatly, summed it up nicely. "I just got tired." He is right. Only those who have done it, managed an IT department, been a police officer or worked in open data know what the pressure is like. My only addition to Mike's words below is that we only have power to open data as much as we have the nerve to push public sector to do so. This is a quote piece from Computer Weekly- the article is written by Bryan Glyck and can be read here: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500251662/Interview-Government-digital-chief-Mike-Bracken-why-I-quit Mike Bracken, the outgoing director of the Government Digital Service, talks exclusively to Computer Weekly about his departure from Whitehall Sometimes what is not said can be just...

Personally identifiable information is more likely when public data is enriched with private data and used in a less-than-transparent manner. This is also known as the “Mosaic Effect”. “Mosaic Effect”, small fact, is a term invented by the intelligence community in the US. No longer do we have transparent government, instead we have transparent citizens. For more information on this etymological footnote, read Victor V. Ramraj’s brilliant book Global Anti-Terrorism Law and Policy. Public data, Open Data, has been paid for by taxpayers. The data is a public asset and should not be given away to private sector companies that have no transparency requirements. See Ade Adewunmi’s brilliant piece written on the UK’s Government Digital Service Blog for more on this. Also a blog post I wrote based on my work at the White House Open Data Roundtables in regards to data as an asset on the OpenDataSoftblog. The Data Exchange Model Already Includes You. Many years ago I worked as a Vice Pres...