Jason Hare's Data Management Blog

  Todd Park at USAID DataJam December 10th, 2012 I was honored to participate in the Global Development Data Jam at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House. The group in attendance represented several NGOs, private sector organizations and federal agencies associated with USAID. The theme of this Data Jam was open data being used to enhance effectiveness in program spending and to create transparency in foreign spending by USAID. USAID DataJam Themes included: The future of the data economy driven by open data and big data Open data as infrastructure The correlation between lack of data access and poverty Open data as the next big economic multiplier Crowdsourcing data cleansing activities Open data is not usable data Social media for situational awareness and crisis management ( http://corp.geofeedia.com/ ). Speaker Notes Todd Park: U.S. Chief Technology Officer, The White House What is the next big thing? GPS was released in the early nineties which led to billion

  Open Government Open Data to Open Government Open Government is not new. The Magna Carta was created in England in 1215 as a Charter to check the power of the monarchy. That the French translation less than 5 years later from Latin to vernacular speech might arguably be hailed as one of the first acts of "open government" in Western Civilization. One may argue that this desire for plurality and dialog that was codified into English law and tradition is actually of Anglo Saxon origin and therefore the descendant of an earlier tradition. One might also tongue-in-cheek say that the Magna Carta was not in machine readable format therefore not "open data". These terms underscore my point. "open data" is not "open government" any more then a street is public transportation. One makes the other possible but it is only a necessary and not sufficient condition. Open Government when it works is the shift in the paradigm of how government interacts with i

  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].