Jason Hare's Data Management Blog

  Regarding the posting by Cathy O'Neil on "Open Data is not a panacea": http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/29/open-data-is-not-a-panacea/#comment-15181 Open Data Ethics Open data professionals are currently debating the ethics of exposing data sets to the public. The main issues are privacy of the individual and the usability of the data. The transformation of data into information and the ethical exposure of "anonymized" data sets are what we are after. I work at the municipal level as a city open data program manager. In my role my task is to deliver a framework of collaboration between our city government and the citizens. The city wants collaboration and input on ideas related to social issues, economic development issues as well as exposing performance indicators on department spending and performance. Data like any asset within government is part of infrastructure. Data alone does not equal transparency. Certainly machine readable data sets are available for any

Open Data as Narrative Recently Mark Headd, City of Philadelphia, posted a blog post about using data for "Urban Storytelling". This is a good way to summarize the transformation of data sets as open data to information that narrates an issue within a city. Mark and the City of Philadelphia told a story about crime within the city. The tools and the source code on GitHub are posted on Mark's blog here: Urban Storytelling with Open Data http://civic.io/2012/12/20/urban-storytelling-with-open-data/ I thought the video showing how the visualization packed a wow impact but as Mark said also painted a sad picture of too many homicides in Philadelphia. Here is the YouTube video of the crime data visualization by Mark Headd That being said there is a point in using open data in this way. This is a great article supporting something we have been talking about in Raleigh. There are really two parts to open data...data as infrastructure. The city providing access to data assets th

USAID Development Data Jam in Washington DC, December 2012 had several speakers referring to mobile technology as the common denominator connecting people to the data economy. This is a well written article applying the idea of citizen/government collaboration toward a positive economic outcome. Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID and a speaker at the Data Jam is also quoted in this article. Ghana Business News » Partnership to turn 4,000 women in Ghana, others into mobile money entrepreneurs

  Original Article From http://open-strategies.de/sessions/open-governance-done-right-creating-rules-without-ruling My Opinion on Governance Governance both from a data curation perspective and a processual, cultural perspective are vital in any open government initiative Most of the time little thought seems to be given to governance. This lack of governance leads to policy problems, data quality problems and the effectiveness of applying open data and open governance initiatives toward true data driven policy making. Posted on Scoop.it Via Ivan Begtin at http://www.scoop.it/t/opengovdaily My Opinion on Scoop.it's Scoop by Ivan Begtin Jason Hare 's insight: Very timely article. I am writing the City of Raleigh's "Open Raleigh Vision". I  hope I can anticipate the need for the types of collaboration I will need on data classification, open data policy, open data brand marketing and service oriented architecture to link it all together. This is all new territory. 

  For my Open Data Program I plan on using a mix of Mondara and ArcGIS Online as my mapping tools. We won't kill Geoportal but link to it and make it accessible to those folks that actually use that data. Chris Herwig from Mapbox.com said it and we all think it: Open data is not truly “open” if it is inaccessible. As the open data space matures, domestically and internationally, we need to start talking about best practices for making open data more open and accessible. I’m going to go over a few of the key takeaways from my recent work, highlighting some successes and failures in providing geodata at the state and local levels in the United States. Read more of Chris Herwig's comments at this link below: http://mapbox.com/blog/trouble-with-geoportals/

Someone from the City of Raleigh sent this in concerning the city's use of #opendata .There is a healthy discussion going on in one of the Linkedin groups Open Development Technology Alliance. + chad foley I thought you and+ Bonner Gaylord might find this interesting being that someone emailed Chad about it this evening. Special report from The Economist focusing on smart cities and how technology turns urban areas into "vast data factories" » IN 1995 GEORGE GILDER, an American writer, declared that “cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era.” Electronic communications would become so easy...

  Long Range Facilities Plan Website One of the last projects I was tasked with as a web analyst at Durham Public Schools was what I think of as "open government". In 2012, Durham Public Schools wanted the public to approve a 9 million dollar IT initiative to upgrade the student computer labs in select DPS schools to reach parity with newer labs in some of the recent construction. The DPS Board of Education and most of the executive leadership team was in a debate about how to approach Durham County to ask for this re-appropriation. One of the ideas was to showcase the nicer labs to show how efficiently the district was spending money within the IT department. My colleague, Charlotte Claypoole, and I thought we should do the opposite. Charlotte and I wanted to show exactly what the problems were within the older schools. Some of these buildings were quite old and the wiring and infrastructure were not capable of handling the computing needs of the students. I built the websit