News and ideas on Open Government Data from around the web. 3 big news items last week:
  • data.gov, the US government's data clearinghouse, is up.
  • Vancouver, BC council voted in a motion favouring a policy of open data, open standards, and open source.  By leading with a policy statement, Vancouver paves the way for other municipalities to follow suit.   The policy has a particularly intriguing clause that asks the city manager to:
    "License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses and the public without restriction."
    The full motion is here (PDF).  CBC describes public reaction to the motion as overwhelmingly positive, quoting Andrea Reimer, the councillor who forwarded the motion:
    "The only sort of negative [comment] was 'Can't you go further? Can't you do more?'"
  • Good news for Canadian websites dealing with the parliamentary hansard: the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs has ruled that all forms of parliamentray proceedings can be re-distributed without infringing crown copyright, as long as the distribution is not for profit.  Suddenly, citizen handard-scraping sites like howdtheyvote.ca are legal.   Read the report here (PDF). How can we get this crown copyright exemption applied to other data sets generated by the federal government?