Open Government Data Roundup
News and ideas on Open Government Data from around the web:
- TransparencyCamp, held 10 days ago in Washington DC, looks like it was a huge success. This video gives some feel for the size of the event, and the enthusiasm of the participants. A choice quote from Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation:
"I think transparency is important because it destroys apathy."
Watch comments from Tim O'Reilly, Craig Newmark (craigslist) and others here. A list of TransparencyCamp community resources is here.
- O'Reilly Conferences and TechWeb will be hosting a Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington in September.
- Vivek Kundra, 34, has been named US Chief Information Officer. Kundra was the man behind the launch of DC's Digital Public Square, as well as DC's recent Apps for Democracy contest. Some quotes from a recent interview on his plans to repeat Digital Public Square on a national level (via Science Library Pad):
VK: One of the things we want to do is embark on launching data.gov which would democratize data and give data access to the public and based on that challenge whether it is citizens, NGOs the private sector to help us think through how we address some of the toughest problems in the public sector.
VK: Data.gov will publish data feeds, so we'll have a vast array of data, and the way I like to think about this is that if you think of two forms of data that have been published in the federal government that have fundamentally transformed the economy.
- In anticipation of data.gov, Wired launched a wiki 3 days ago called "Open Up Government Data", with the tagline "Data.gov is coming. Let's help build it."
- The Agenda (TV Ontario) ran an episode called 'The New Transparency -- Open source politics: how the new transparency is transforming campaigning, policy-making and governance.' on March 6th. Podcasts and video are available on the TVO site.
www.USGovXML.com is an index of publically available web services and XML data sources provided by the US government. It includes detailed descriptions of the data sources and their operations. Links to the host systems for documentation, tech support, etc. are also available. Source code snippets are provided to help developers better understand how to use the data sources. Web based applets, for use by mobile devices (i.e. SmartPhones), have also been provided. The mobile applets are available at www.USGovXML.com/mobile.
Just a quick note to thank you for your efforts, transparency in government is indeed necessary to have accountability which in turn is key to protecting or democracy. With the ever decreasing nonpartisan reporting by the MSM and the ever increasing efforts by government to stifle the flow of accurate and timely information the internet and online tools to make access to information easer and more wide spread is going to be very important. I have made mention of your efforts in my latest post on our new blog at http://democracyunderfire.blogspot.com/ and will be watching your projects as they develop with great interest.
Do drop in to our blog and comment upon our efforts to “give a voice to our concern about the continued erosion of our democratic processesâ€Â, thanks again for you efforts.