Thinking Hard About the Future

Is Your Data Free? from Stormy Peters (GNOME Foundation)
Presentation: Is Your Data Free_ Presentation [PDF]

We worried about making sure we had free and open source software to use, we worried about privacy, we worried about user rights. And then we handed the keys to our data to “free” web services. How can we ensure that our data is in the hands of web services that will respect our rights? How can free and open source software ideals be applied to web services?

Open Government – San Francisco from  Dave Geller (City and County of San Francisco)
Presentations: Open Government – San Francisco Presentation [ODP],
Open Government – San Francisco Presentation 1 [PPT]

In this session members of the Emerging Technologies group for the City and County of San Francisco will discuss open government and open source initiatives enacted in 2009/2010.

Open Identity for Open Government from Don Thibeau (OpenID Foundation)
Presentation: Open Identity for Open Government Presentation [PPTX]

Citizen involvement via online interactions requires trust: trust by citizens that their identity data is protected by government websites, and trust by government websites that private data is accessed only by the citizen. This talk describes the Open Identity Framework created to meet government certification requirements while meeting the privacy requirements of citizens and private industry.

This project was initiated by Institute of Contemporary Development and launched publicly 2 days ago during “Tver economic forum”. It includes information about 1 400 000 federal contracts, about 210 000 contracts of regional governments. Information about more than 260 000 suppliers and 26 000 customers. It’s all based on public open data about russian spending which being disclosed last 3 years by Federal Treasury. We just used this open data to provide all good people of Russia new view on government public spending.

Declaration of Open Government

The Australian Government now declares that, in order to promote greater participation in Australia’s democracy, it is committed to open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology.

Citizen collaboration in policy and service delivery design will enhance the processes of government and improve the outcomes sought. Collaboration with citizens is to be enabled and encouraged. Agencies are to reduce barriers to online engagement, undertake social networking, crowd sourcing and online collaboration projects and support online engagement by employees, in accordance with the Australian Public Service Commission Guidelines.

The possibilities for open government depend on the innovative use of new internet-based technologies. Agencies are to develop policies that support employee-initiated, innovative Government 2.0-based proposals.

The Australian Government’s support for openness and transparency in Government has three key principles:

• Informing: strengthening citizen’s rights of access to information, establishing a pro-disclosure culture across Australian Government agencies including through online innovation, and making government information more accessible and usable;
• Engaging: collaborating with citizens on policy and service delivery to enhance the processes of government and improve the outcomes sought; and
• Participating: making government more consultative and participative.

Supporting Initiatives

The Australian Government’s commitment to action on each of these principles is demonstrated by:

• the passage of legislation reforming the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and establishing the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner;
• the Government’s announcement on 3 May 2010 of its response to the Government 2.0 Taskforce report, Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0;  and
• Its response to the Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration report, in which the Government agreed that creating more open government is a key reform for the Australian Public Service.

Effective collaboration between citizens and government requires timely sharing of the information held by Government. The Government’s FOI Reforms create the new statutory Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and establish a comprehensive Information Publication Scheme that requires agencies to publish a wide range of information.

The Australian Government has commenced the program of initiatives outlined in its response to the Taskforce’s report in accordance with the agreed implementation timetable.

The Department of Finance and Deregulation will report annually on implementation progress of the recommendations of the Government 2.0 Taskforce to the Government through the Secretaries’ Information and Communications Technology Governance Board.

The Gillard Government is committed to creating a culture of public sector openness, transparency and engagement. This Declaration is a demonstration of that commitment.

The Declaration underpins a range of Government initiatives already under way. The establishment of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Government’s broader freedom of information reforms aim to restore trust and integrity in government and drive agencies to proactively release information to the public. The Declaration also reflects one of the key reforms of Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for Reform of Australian Government Administration, which called for more open government.

Interessant sind beide Veranstaltungen vor allem, um sich einen Einblick über die neuesten Open Government Entwicklungen und Ideen aus und in den USA zu verschaffen, aber auch, um einen Einblick in die Thematik zu bekommen. Mittlerweile sind auch viele der Talks auf der Konferenz als Videos bei YouTube zu finden, mit so inspirierenden Rednern wie dem Web-Gründer Tim Berners-Lee oder Clay Johnson, dem Direktor der Sunlight Labs von der Sunlight Foundation. Als Kostprobe unten eingebettet ist die wie immer sehr feurige Eröffnungsrede von Tim O’Reilly, nach dessen Genuss man am liebsten gleich alle Regierungsdaten der Welt auf einmal hacken möchte! :-)

Über die Gov 2.0 Expo ist schon viel geschrieben worden, von daher hier nur noch ein paar Verweise zu weitergehenden Artikeln, z.B. in der Huffington Post, auf CNN.com und dem Blog OhMyGov!.

Analysis: this government is open to scrutiny:

Knowledge is power, said the politician and philosopher Francis Bacon. Today we live in the information age, and today information can be power too.

How Open Data Applications are Improving Government:

Open data is the big trend these days when people talk about “Government 2.0.” In reality, the open data movement has just begun, with governments finally starting to release dataen massein an effort to promote transparency. While projects likeApps for Democracy have received significant media attention, we are just at the dawn of the government open data app movement.

Tom Steinberg (mysociety.org) to Advise new UK Government on Transparency:

I will chair a new Transparency Board, which will include experts, including perhaps the Government’s greatest critic when it comes to transparency, Tom Steinberg. Based at the heart of government in the Cabinet Office, we’ll be listening to what the public want and making sure they get the information they ask for wherever humanly possible.

The coming data explosion:

One of the key aspects of the emergingInternet of Things- where real-world objects are connected to the Internet – is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more “things” in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content – which has increased 15-fold over the past few years,according toa presentationthatGoogleVP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said during her presentation that this “data explosion is bigger than Moore’s law.”

Open data? Fine. But available isn’t accessible:
Technology has become ubiquitous, a potential our society is rather ignoring at the moment. Think about it.
We spend most of our work day in front of a screen, some of our friends never stop to Twitter, most of them check their emails on their blackberry even when drunk, and now we grab the iPad on the weekend in our leisure time. But what does it really mean for our societies to be surrounded by this new digital technology? What chances lie there in being surrounded by computers? This is a question, we barely think about. Not good. At the moment, we can see some serious potential we are about to miss.

Accountability, better services and economic opportunity:
The promise of government accountability, better government services, and new economic opportunity is why we do what we do.

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 ist zuerst erschienen im Creative Commons Weblog, die Autorin ist Jane Park. Der Artikel steht unter Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The National Data Catalog is an open platform for government data sets and APIs, making it easy to find datasets by and about government, across all levels (federal, state, and local) and across all branches (executive, legislative, and judicial). The data here is imported from several sources and curated by our staff. Currently, we catalog data from:

• Data.gov
• Washington, D.C.
• Utah
• The Sunlight Foundation and its partners