Further to Vikram Kumar’s excellent Showing us a better way post, here is some information about the Open Government Information and Data Re-use project, led by the State Services Commission.
Here also is our just released Promoting Government Information and Data Re-use Background Paper. We have summarised the New Zealand government information environment, described key international government information policies and initiatives, and are proposing a programme to work with suppliers and users of non-personal government information and data.
We want to work with you to develop an approach for opening up this information and data to allow re-use for the benefit of the New Zealand economy and New Zealanders.
We want to understand any issues being faced by suppliers of this information and data. We also want to work with anyone who is using it now or is wanting to re-use or re-purpose it to create new information or products. Help us understand what is involved in providing data in readily usable or re-usable formats and any copyright, licensing, funding, pricing or other issues.
Once we know about your issues, we would like to work together with you to see how they impact on the Policy Framework for Government-Held Information.
There is a lot happening internationally in this space. For example:
- The UK Treasury/Shareholder Executive assessment of trading funds is considering the potential for innovation and growth from increasing commercial and other use of public sector information. It will shortly publish some key principles for the re-use of this information, consider how these currently apply in each of the trading funds and how they might apply in the future, and the role of the Office of Public Sector Information in ensuring that Government policy is fully reflected in practice
- The Victorian State Government released its Discussion Document [PDF] earlier this year and will report to Parliament in mid 2009
- The Australian Federal Government is considering building on the excellent work on the Queensland Government Information Licensing Framework.
Other information is set out in the Background Paper. If you want to get involved in our New Zealand work or have some comments you wish to make, please email opendata.reuse@ssc.govt.nz, or place a comment on this blog.
7 Comments
It is great to see this discussion on Info & Data Reuse starting in a potentially collaborative environment. I have enthusiastically reached for this document intending to make notes and comments on it and engage in discussion around it, i.e. with thoughts of reusing and remixing the info.
Unfortunately, it is an uneditable (to me) PDF or XML.
Surely you can do better than this!
Meanwhile I will fire up the printer, get out the pencil and the hi-lighters.
Regards
Jim McLeod
Thanks for pushing our boundaries, Jim. Our e.govt.nz website provides the document in two formats but is not interactive as you have noted. Hence this In Development blog - so please post more comments here.
But we are wanting engagement exactly as you have described. Can you elaborate further on what you would like us to do.
Cheers
Thanks Keitha, for initiating this discussion and entertaining flexible boundaries. I am thinking through some ideas and will attempt to frame them over the next couple of days. One area I have been mulling is the concepts contained in “Keystone Advantage” and how they might map to government agencies.
One thing I haven’t found is your timeframe. For example for how long do you anticipate this discussion continuing before you start conflating issues and drafting?
Cheers
April and June 2009 are our key dates at this stage. In April we are expecting to start bringing together the data re-use issues identified by suppliers and users. We anticipate that these will include copyright and licensing, pricing and funding and data standards and formats. In June we expect to have moved to drafting material covering some of those issues.
Cheers
I tried emailing but have no response so far. I’ve been helping on a new site called zoodle.co.nz and we have a need for easier access to Government data. Can someone please get back to me regarding getting involved with this project? Email address is on my blog http://devour.co.nz.
Thanks,
Glen
Hi, Glen
Thanks for your query. I’m out of the office until Wednesday 4 Feb. I have alerted my colleagues to your request, and will also get back to you on Wednesday
Keitha Booth
A brief note describing what I see as severe limitations regarding the use of CC3 as an effective licence for open datasets in general and spatial datasets in particular.
1. Attribution: CC3 endorses whatever attribution a data provider can dream up. For most of the types of information CC3 is designed for, this is not an issue, but when data derived from 20 different sources is remixed, mashed up & put on a user defined online map, then it can become very difficult & sometimes impossible to ensure the attribution requirements are met.
2. Provenance. CC3 has nothing about data provenance or metadata. Without information about a datset, describing it’s reliability, accuracy, precision, dates it represents, etc, making any given dataset freely available is of very limited merit, as such metadata is critical for users to make sensible decisions about what a dataset is appropriate for. For example, releasing a road centreline dataset is very useful, but only if we know when it was current, what sort of accuracy & errors it has, etc. If two or three such datasets are released, without such information, which one should be used where? Such data can not only become inaccurate, but actually misleading.