An open government bar camp was held on August 29, as we’ve already mentioned. But what exactly did that mean?
It takes a special kind of person to voluntarily choose to sequester themselves in a bunker on a sunny Saturday to talk about government and data all day long. Luckily, Wellington is full of just that sort of people. They might look glum in the photo to the right, but that was mostly because the coffee was instant. Things lightened up after that. Somewhat.
So why did we do it?
As Brian from Silverstripe put it
Government agencies, as part of their work, collect a substantial amount of non-personal data – from geospatial and environmental data to statistics. In most cases public money is spent to research and obtain this data, so it should be accessible for everyone to use.
The people who attended Bar Camp were a mix of government and private sector workers. They came to explain themselves, or to demand answers from others. They also came to learn from one another, and to work together. What united us was wanting was find ways that we could open up more government data so that more could be made out of it.
What did we do?
It was nice to see vendors and government workers coming together with one goal in mind. Even though people had quite diferent perspectives at times, most drama was kept to a mimimum. The loose discussion style of bar camps can result in people going off on tangents, but for the most part we managed to avoid this.
Handily located in the Open Wiki is a list of all the sessions that took place over the day. Topics were suggested on the day, agreed on, and then attendees could wander around as they were interested. I started with why open is important, put out some suggestions for what Radio NZ could do to sort out its 4000 hours of content (I’m a big advocate for opening up tagging to users – or to put that in the language of the day “crowdsourcing a folksonomy) and just generally tried to remind people that although we weren’t necessarily very representative of the population as a whole (see also: spending Saturdays inside discussing government) perhaps instead of refering to what “people” want we could start by just building what we wanted.
The last session of the day took place in the auditorium was facilitated by Julian, who has written about it in more detail. People tweeted in their suggestions about what they wanted to see, such as:
- aggregate grants and scholarships available across govt
- public transport mashups (which bus takes least time)
- something with stats, like crime or benefits or unemployment – people love visualisations – graphs and maps, mmmm
- user research plan to identify data & tools to help elderly
- aggregate grants and scholarships available across govt
(Read the full list here)
Naturally there were drinks after this. The next day people sat down and tried to deliver actual results at the hackfest, which I didn’t actually attend so I’m probably not the best person to write about it.
Julie Star wrote about her experience at Bar Camp for Idealog:
It’s all well and good posting PDFs and text files and a few spreadsheets in the depths of multiple websites, which various government agencies do now, but you often have to be a detective to find them and masochistically fond of manual processes if you want to extract just those bits of data that you’re interested in using elsewhere.
How will we go on from here?
Well, this is the big thing. We had lots of ideas and enthusiam, but unless we push, there aren’t going to be any results. This is where you come in. If you’re reading this, you’re now officially part of Open Govt. What do you want to see happen? And what skills do you have to lend to the cause?
It’s all very well the well-intentioned agitators amongst us calling for “open government”, demanding “open data” and holding wacky barcamps and setting up wikis and blogs but what about those employed within the government agencies that sit upon the data (sorry, I mean lovingly hold the data for New Zealanders)?