Hier der Link zur Ankündigung, außerdem der Link zur Portalseite. Bislang kann man nur die bereitgestellten Materialien lesen, die Beteiligungsfunktion wird aber vermutlich bald freigeschaltet.

Die Software wurde entwickelt von Frank Behrend von ELIQOS.

The new Tory / Libdem Coalition in the UK announced their programme for government recently. In a part of this programme they announce their plans regarding government transparency, the underlying principle being the following one:

The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account. We also recognise that this will help to deliver better value for money in public spending, and help us achieve our aim of cutting the record deficit. Setting government data free will bring significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites.

To achieve this aim, they want to take the following actions:

• We will require anyone paid more than the Prime Minister in the centrally funded public sector to have their salary signed off by the Treasury.
• We will regulate lobbying through introducing a statutory register of lobbyists and ensuring greater transparency.
• We will also pursue a detailed agreement on limiting donations and reforming party funding in order to remove big money from politics.
• We will strengthen the powers of Select Committees to scrutinise major public appointments.
• We will introduce new protections for whistleblowers in the public sector.
• We will take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs; and we will publish government ICT contracts online.
• We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
• We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
• We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
• We will require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data.
• We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full.
• We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.

This sounds pretty nice for the beginning, let’s see if they keep the promise.

Clay Johnson briefly runs through some of the more notable entries from the ‘Apps for America II’ development contest, all of which utilize information exclusively from Data.gov.

Among the awards offered was a $2500 prize for visualization, which aimed to encourage involvement from the artistic community. The winner of this prize, the Quakespotter Desktop app operates in conjunction with Google Earth and Twitter.com to match the location of an earthquake with mentions of the same earthquake on Twitter.

Johnson argues that this effort shows how over 1000 developers can make helpful, creative and retail use of the data collected wholesale by governments.  Additional entries he highlights include usaspending.gov, flyontime.us, thisweknow.org and datamasher.org.

More about the Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge here.

This is a good moment to mention the upcoming next gov2.0 expo from 25. to 27 May 2010 in Washington DC, USA. See the full program here. Here is a preview of the panels Clay will be involved in:
Truly Open Data

Truly Open Data means going beyond putting a CSV file on the Internet. It means being responsible for what you put out in ways that government isn’t used to doing – and it means developing new lines of communications with the public. This workshop will give examples of how to publish data, how to maintain it, and how to handle it when things go wrong. Read more.
Sunlight Foundation Contest Winners

Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs, will be announcing winners from the Sunlight Foundation’s newest contest. Previous contests, Apps for America and Apps for America the Data.gov edition, have spurred a community of “hactivists” or civically-minded technologists to show off what they can do for their country. Read more.

The Business of Being Open

What is the future of technology, open data, and citizen collaboration? How does enterprise view its role in the open government community and within government? Hear from IBM, Adobe, and Microsoft about how each company works with local and federal governments, building a sustainable network, as well as the business of facilitating open government. Read more.

Regarding the Gov 2.0 Recommendations 6.3-6.6, which state that Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) should be the default licence for PSI, the report provides “agreement in principle,” undertaking that the IP Guidelines will not “impede the default open licensing position proposed in recommendation 6.3.”

Since then, Australia has released three major government publications under Creative Commons licenses, the latest being theirnational budget under CC BY.

In fact, the last week has seen the release of three major Federal Government reports – the Budget, the Gov 2.0 response and the NBN Implementation Study – all under CC licences. This seems to be a great indicator that the government really means what it says – open access is going to be the default position for the Australian Federal Government from now on.

This marks an exciting time for the Australian government, as they move towards fulfilling their commitment to openness. For more information, see CC Australia’s post on the matter.

Dieser Artikel was published first by Jane Park in the  Creative Commons Weblog and has a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.