Last weekend, New Zealand joined Australia for GovHack 2015. If you’re not familiar with the idea, this is a 2-day hackathon set up for people – community, industry, academia, civil society and public sector − to get creative with government data. The goal is to build some ‘thing’ using open government data. To be clear: this isRead… Read more »
Have you ever wondered how many traffic tickets New York hands out every year? Or how many health outbreaks affect the Empire State? Now, with Open NY, the state’s transparency and openness initiative, you can. Governor Andrew Cuomo initiated Open NY in 2013 to create “unprecedented transparency across all levels of government.” Now, about twoRead… Read more »
Socrata has released an interesting benchmark study on open government data, which looks at the state of open data from the perspectives of citizens, developers and government. It is interesting to compare which data government stakeholders consider important to publish, compared to what citizens feel is important. Looking at Very Important from the tables (below)Read… Read more »
If you ask 20 people to define open government, you will get 20 different responses. The lack of uniformed definitions makes implementing open government services very difficult. It would be like asking a pastry chef to bake a cherry pie and then providing 20 different recipes. The chef would have no idea which pie youRead… Read more »
Have you ever sat down to read a Congressional bill? Probably not. They are difficult to understand, use bureaucratic language and are generally unreadable. So it’s no wonder that most of us don’t have the inclination to pick up a bill and read through it. But this lack of understanding is creating a void betweenRead… Read more »
The Open Government Initiative ushered in many new projects geared toward making government information more accessible to the public. With Data.gov, many government datasets were made easily accessible to the public. Ideally, access to this information would promote citizen innovation as datasets were utilized by the public singularly, or as mash-ups, to create valuable applications.Read… Read more »
It appears that big developments in local open government stemming from high level planning between major US cities that has been in the works since 2009 could be bearing fruit within the next few months. A partnership of IT executives from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — known asRead… Read more »
Despite increasing public support (as well as a number of executive mandates) publishing public data in a machine-readable format is not as simple as pressing the “publish” button. Why? Equally important as exposing the information itself is fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. By making the publishing agency, not the public, responsible for makingRead… Read more »
There’s the on going debate of the worth of Open Government and or Gov 2.0. We’ve been back and forth on the issue umpteen times on GovLoop: – Open Government is Not Dead: The Conversation is Just Maturing… – Open is Dead – Four Scenarios of the Future of Gov 2.0 But for any ofRead… Read more »
Raleigh, NC—City Council adopts open source policy On Tuesday, February 7, the Raleigh City Council passed an Open Source Government Resolution, unanimously, promoting the use of open source software and open data. The resolution includes language that puts open source software on the same playing field as proprietary software in the procurement process. It alsoRead… Read more »