Finnish Open Data Guidebook

The Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications’ news announcement describes work underway on a Finnish ‘Open Government Data Guidebook’ and invites participation in its making. Here is an English translation of the Ministries news.

Key points about the Open Data Guidebook

• The Guide will cover concrete and topical issues of what the provision of open data should be taken into account. In addition, manual will review the benefits of open government data to society.
• To draft the Guidebook, interviews were undertaken with Finnish and international politicians civil servants, entrepreneurs, developers, and experts. This is in addition to information collected from other sources.
• The Guidebook has an important role to play in inspiring government to open data. It will also provide valuable and current information for the Finnish Government’s ‘Working Group’ that was recently established to enhance the use of public sector information plus the Finnish Government’s work on developing a new national information society strategy for the upcoming term of government.

Plans are to publish the Finnish language version of the Guidebook by the 25^th March 2010 using a Creative Commons Licence. Antti Poikola one of the Authors writes in his Blog:

The poster from Ton Zijlstra and James Burke, below summarizes pretty much the practical part of opening the data (HOW), that we want to tell in our guide book. Beside practicalities we need to argument the case (WHY) of opening the data, but that is a bit longer story…