Opening Up Government Data:
Give it to Us Raw, Give it to Us Now

Open Tech
July 4th 2009

Rufus Pollock
[open knowledge foundation]
[http://www.okfn.org/]

About the Foundation

OKFN website

Founded 2004 / Not-for-profit

Promoting and Developing Open Knowledge

http://www.opendefinition.org/

OKD

Open = Freedom to Access / Use / Re-use / Redistribute

No restrictions other than, perhaps, share-alike and attribution

We've Been Making Progress
But Still a Long Way to Go

I think of our first OK forums (early 2006): opening up government civic and geo data

CCRKE (2001!) committed to marginal cost access for most PSI

Why so slow?

Main challenge is 'social':
Information is power
(and money!)

Benefits are subtle and slow to manifest

(This is infrastructure like electricity or roads ...)

Chicken and egg problem: w/o cool apps hard to convince policy-makers and hard to build apps with no data

What Should We be Doing

One Ring to Rule Them All
vs.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined

The Revolution Should be Decentralized

Give us (Open) Data Raw, Give it to us Now

http://blog.okfn.org/2007/11/07/give-us-the-data-raw-and-give-it-to-us-now/

The data is primary, the interface is secondary

Opening Government Data "Rules"

  1. "Really" open: use an open license for data
  2. Data first, interface second - shiny front ends come last
  3. Don't worry about formats – as long as its RAW
    • csv, rdf, xls, json ... - doesn't matter
  4. Reuse existing infrastructure where possible
    • Cloud storage, ckan.net, ...
  5. Build demand and supply feedback into the system
  6. Credit for good providers, demand info (voting) from developer and users

A Vision for Data.Gov.Uk

A Vision for Data.Gov.Uk (Tidied!)

We've been developing these tools

A registry for Open Data and Content

Debianizing data production and sharing ...

530 packages and counting

We've been developing these tools

http://grid.okfn.org/

An open distributed storage service

The Promised Land is Nearly Here

But we can be sure it won't be the end of the journey

Rufus Pollock
Open Knowledge Foundation
rufus.pollock@okfn.org