10 principles for open data
Daniel Schuman
Daniel
Daniel Schuman
Director, Advisory Committee on Transparency
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795
Twitter: danielschuman
Josh Tauberer
I wrote a similar but much longer update to the original 8 principles
last year. It's on the revamped www.opengovdata.org site.
I've found that around 20 distinct principles have been proposed by
various people and groups and they're all interesting.
- Josh Tauberer
- CivicImpulse / GovTrack.us
http://razor.occams.info | www.govtrack.us | civicimpulse.com
"Members of both sides are reminded not to use guests of the
House as props."
On 08/11/2010 11:45 AM, Daniel Schuman wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Over the last few years, people have been trying to
> identify/refine/codify principles for making data (especially government
> data) open to the public. Several years ago a conference took place on
> identifying these open data principles, and additional efforts have been
> made since then to flesh out the ideas.
>
> Standing on the shoulders of these efforts, I've put together (and
> slightly refined and expanded) these principles into a document that
> lays them out for the intelligent layperson. It's intended as a policy
> -- and not technology -- document, and should serve as an introduction
> for policymakers interested in this kind of stuff.
>
> I've put up an explanatory blogpost here <http://bit.ly/ctkygR>, and the
> full document is available here <http://bit.ly/bWAJ6A>.
>
> This isn't a finished product, but rather another step along the way. I
> welcome your suggestions and corrections.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Daniel
>
> Daniel Schuman
> Director, Advisory Committee on Transparency
> Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation
> o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795
> Twitter: danielschuman
>
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Joseph Lorenzo Hall
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--
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate
UC Berkeley School of Information
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
http://josephhall.org/
Josh Tauberer
> Hey Josh, can we get a link? ::) best wishes, Joe
>
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 5:13 PM, Josh Tauberer<taub...@govtrack.us> wrote:
>> I think you've seen it, but I thought for others I should just note that I
>> wrote a similar but much longer update to the original 8 principles last
>> year. It's on the revamped www.opengovdata.org site.
Here's the direct link:
http://razor.occams.info/pubdocs/opendataciviccapital.html
In summary, the total list of recommendations I found (and liked) were:
1. Available on the Internet for free (OKD's "access" and Sunlight's
Principles for Transparency in Government)
From the original 8 (some overlapping with the OKD):
2. Primary (and I'd throw "Complete" in here, in retrospect --- I never
really understood "complete" although I had a dream about it recently...)
3. Timely
4. Accessible (industry standards, bulk)
5. Machine Processable
6. Non-discriminatory
7. Non-proprietary
8. License-free
Clay Johnson first pointed out to me the obvious missing one, and Silona
Bonewald has looked at it more concretely:
9. Permanence / Preservation
From the Association of Computing Machinery's Recommendation on Open
Government:
10. Formats and Approaches that Promote Analysis
11. Safe file formats that don't contain executable content
12. Provenance and trust
From the Association of Government Accountants, and to some extent the
Open House Project and the 8 Principles:
13. Public Input
14. Public Review of the Data Collection Process
From me:
15. Engage in interagency coordination when it would be useful to
establish basic standards
16. Avoid singling out technologies that are also endorsements for
particular corporations
From Google: Use sitemaps, robots, and deep-searchable forms properly
Use globally unique identifiers for things in the data
From me, W3C: Use Linked Open Data (i.e. semantic web tech)
In my opinion, only the first 8 truly describe "open government data".
Everything else is icing on the cake --- how to do openness well, but
beyond at least the first hurdle of making it minimally open. That's why
I call these best practices for open government data, rather than simply
principles of open government data. So despite all of what I listed, I
don't find a compelling reason to actually "revise" the original 8
Principles when we're looking for a definition of openness that's
suitable for government. (The OKD is great but I think the bar is too
low for government.) But, clearly, there is a long list of things a data
publisher can do to make the data better and better for reuse, and so
there are a lot of potential best practices.
Since the Sebastopol meeting there had been a few attempts on the
related mail list and wiki to make the 8 Principles more reader
friendly. The results weren't terribly good IMO, which is why I went off
and wrote the doc above. (Thanks go to Gunnar, btw, for some help with
that.)
If others can make it even friendlier, great. (Am I going to get
involved in rehashing the details again? Probably not.) But, I would
like to suggest we avoid further fragmentation on this. We accidentally
fragmented when the Sebastopol meeting went forward without knowledge of
the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation in the UK. And lo and behold
today there are two sites on this topic, www.opengovdata.org which came
out of Sebastopol (and which I'm stewarding since no one else is) and
www.opengovernmentdata.org (!!) from the OKF guys. Plus the OpenMuni
Wiki, and Daniel's wiki page.
There are some legitimate reasons for keeping some of these things
separate. There's a real cultural difference between openness in the US
and openness in the UK and in what seems to be a European tradition ---
and so I don't think we here in the US will be able to reconcile exactly
with the OKF guys. But otherwise it would be a great idea to try to keep
these sorts of resources unified.
Daniel Schuman
Daniel
Daniel Schuman
Director, Advisory Committee on Transparency
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795
Twitter: danielschuman