Sir Tim: "Public Data is a Public Good"
The man - er, knight - himself comments on the opening up of the Ordnance Survey, and concludes with these thoughts:Data is beginning to drive the Government’s websites. But without a consistent policy to make it available to others, without the use of open standards and unrestrictive licences for reuse, information stays compartmentalised and its full value is lost.
Openly available public data not only creates economic and social capital, it also creates bottom-up pressure to improve public services. Data is essential in enabling citizens to choose between public service providers. It helps them to compare their local services with services elsewhere. It enables all of us to lobby for improvement. Public data is a public good.
Yup, yup and yup. (Via Free Our Data.)
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2 comments:
Glyn, I am not sure if you've seen it yet, but check out data.govt.nz
The recently launched data.govt.nz site is the New Zealand Government's official Government open data catalogue site.
It's not a repository, but provides a regularly updated catalogue of links to datasets provided by all NZ Government Departments and Agencies.
It takes a lead from the NZ Open Data Catalogue site, http://cat.open.org.nz/
data.govt.nz also has a twitter account http://twitter.com/data_govt_nz
I think it would be good to show that some governments have already embraced the Open Data philosophy :)
@Ard: thanks for the great links. I was vaguely aware of what was going on, but hadn't looked recently: seems to be coming along.
I've tweeted about it here:
http://twitter.com/glynmoody/status/5854426729
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