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Image by Open Knowledge Foundation via Flickr
Yesterday, Tom Slee wrote a blog post called "Why the 'Open Data Movement' is a Joke," which - and I say this as a Canadian who understands the context in which Slee is writing - is filled with valid complaints about our government, but which I feel paints a flawed picture of the open data movement. Evgeny Morozov tweeted about the post... [read more]
Image: Justin Grimes
“Open Data Movement” is a phrase dragged out by media-oriented personalities to cloak a private-sector initiative in the mantle of progressive politics. Along with other cyberculture terms (“hacktivism”, “unconferences”, “hackathons”) the word “movement” suggests a countercultural grass-roots initiative for social change, but there isn’t anything of the sort that I can see. [read more]
Photo by mgrayflickr via Flickr
Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter has signed an executive order to establish an Open Data policy, which will provide increased access and will enhance the transparency of City data sets. The Executive Order creates a Chief Data Officer (CDO) position, which will oversee and enforce the Open Data Policy and will report to the Chief... [read more]
Many of you are probably aware that Facebook's active membership is larger than the population of the world's third largest country, however the numbers are getting too big to relate to Australia. So I've taken the idea and compiled a view of Australia by state, including the main social networks used by Aussies as if they were... [read more]
The Open Data Center Alliance a group of public companies focused on standardizing the IT requirements for cloud projects has released five new models for data usage. According to the Alliance, the usage models are based on user driven feedback about cloud computing as well as the original vision set out by the organization last year to... [read more]
The Census Bureau has released the 1940 Census results for the first time. The Census Bureau has provided a fairly simple mechanism for sorting through the basic information, with some pretty cool data visualization. [read more]
A new paper on “The New Ambiguity of ‘Open Government’” by Princeton scholars David Robinson and Harlan Yu is essential reading on the state of open government and open data in 2012. As the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper noted in a post about the new paper and open government data this morning, “paying close attention to language can reveal... [read more]
Last November I highlighted a report from the Commons political and constitutional reform committee which contained some pretty negative views about the use of 'data matching' to improve the electoral register. "The evidence we have received... suggests that data matching will be of limited effectiveness, especially in identifying... [read more]
I really like how data.gov is launching niche communities like health.data.gov. Generally I believe if we want interest in our government data it's not going to be developing just broad "data" ecosystem. Instead, I think we need to build smaller ecosystems like transit data, health data, jobs data, education data, etc.... [read more]
Photo by Salim Virji via Flickr
Some small examples of open data use and public servants who do and don't understand open data from the Province of British Columbia to the City of Vancouver. Open Libraries? For the past several years - ever since the open motion was passed in Vancouver - the city has been releasing more and more data sets. One data set I've encouraged... [read more]
In a Fast Company post earlier this week, information architect and UX consultant Hana Schank is highly skeptical of whether New York City takes digital seriously. The city’s approach to digital development” focuses on plenty of sizzle, not much steak,” writes Schank. “It’s time for the city to deeply explore what New York’s... [read more]
As some readers and International Open Data Hackathon participants know, I'm really keen on developers reusing each others code. All too often, in hackathons, we like to build something from scratch (which can be fun) but I've always liked the idea of hackathons either spurring genuine projects that others can reuse, or using a hackathon... [read more]
I’ve been thinking a lot about these two types of graphs at the moment. This first is a single chart that shows income growth for various segments of the US population broken down by wealth. This second is a group of graphs that talk about pageviews and visits to various websites on the internet. What is fascinating about the... [read more]
Having written previously about the downside of the government's decision to scrap the Co-ordinated Online Register of Electors (CORE), it is worth mentioning a report published today by the Commons political and constitutional reform committee. The bulk of the report looks at issues related to individual voter registration,... [read more]
What is the state of the open data movement? Yesterday, during my opening keynote at the Open Government Data Camp (held this year in Warsaw, Poland) I sought to follow up on my talk from last year's conference. Here's my take of where we are today (I'll post/link to a video of the talk as soon as the Open Knowledge Foundation makes it... [read more]
Dean Halstead is a Lead Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton and serves on the Advisory Board for the SmartBrief on Social Media. More »
John Kamensky is a Senior Fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government. More »
Steve Radick is a Lead Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton and serves on the Advisory Board for the SmartBrief on Social Media. More »
I understand that there's always a need to experiment for new design to make it better but they also keep in mind that the more they add details, the more they make it complicated. The CFPB, which opened up for business last summer, said Wednesday that it will next be going after loan providers ...
By the way, thanks for the useful info's.
Talking about transparency and actually doing it are two different things. It ...