Jason Hare's Data Management Blog

  From the Guardian UK: The US-based Center for Technology in Government has released practical advice for government managers planning or actively engaged in open data initiatives. A white paper from the center, The dynamics of Opening Government Data, is based on findings from a year-long research project at the University of Albany (State University of New York) and aims to help organisations understand the value of open data. Findings Releasing government data that is relevant to both agency performance and the public interest. Investing in strategies to estimate how different stakeholders will use the data. Devising data management practices that improve context. Thinking about sustainability for long-term value creation. The recommendations are based on two case studies: public access to street construction project data in Alberta, Canada, and public access to restaurant health inspection data in New York. They include: Download the whitepaper here: http://www.ctg.albany.edu/

  President Obama promised a more transparent government on Day One of his first term, and his attorney general followed suit less than two months later with a memorandum urging all heads of executive departments to err on the side of openness when it comes to disclosure requests. But a recent audit by the George Washington University-based National Security Archive found that nearly 70 percent of government agencies have not updated their Freedom of Information regulations since U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sent out that letter, and well over half have not done so since Congress and President George W. Bush approved the Open Government Act of 2007, which mandated certain changes. This is a partial reprint from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/agencies-lag-on-transparency-report-says/2012/12/04/b853385c-3e56-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_story.html

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.