Byline: miramarmike
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)?
Without someone with both authority and mana to take the open government/open data message into the heart of bureaucracies that then it will be a long hard uphill road. But if you work within an agency how are you to know about the changing world, that the closed view on information is no longer the dominant one, or that you should be looking at giving it away instead of protecting it from all comers.
In a nutshell, you don’t know you can if you don’t know you can.
Vikram Kumar from the State Services Commission (SSC), those fine folks that recently unleased the draft New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL) (blog post), recently presented “Open Government/Open Data” (ppt) to “an audience of government’s recordkeepers” (link).
If you’re working with information/data held within a government agency and are looking for advice/guidance on any of the following, get in touch with Vikram and let him help you out with answering:
- What (and what not) data and information to set free?
- Why set it free?
- How do you set it free?
- What is “open data”?
- What is “open government”?
- What does this mean for OIAs?
Interested, check out the “Open Government/Open Data” presentation and the SSC: Open Government Information and Data Re-use Project information. And then get in touch with [email protected]
* Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/gettysgirl/3537413538/ under CC licence
In the interest of openess, maybe we could have the posts’ authors’ names displayed?
Yup! I just noticed that they weren’t when Ros made fun of me for a spelling mistake that Mike wrote! Authors will be added very shortly.