In my earlier post, A wizard behind a curtain, we celebrated an early step in an age of value being added to Government information. Days later, an article was published which better articulated what I hoped was beginning for New Zealand Government:
“These innovations are not primarily creatures of government or the marketplace. They represent a new “commons sector” — a realm of collective wealth generated by ordinary people through their own resourcefulness and sharing, largely outside of the money economy.”
Many wizards mobilise
Back in February, we hosted a workshop here at the Commission on Perspectives on Open Data: Re-use of Government-held Non-personal Data.
Stemming from this workshop Nat Torkington (a panellist from the workshop) and Glen Barnes (an attendee from the workshop) launched Open New Zealand, which includes the Open Data Catalogue “an open, independent catalogue of Government and Local Body datasets” and the Open Government Ninjas Forum. Many other workshop attendees have also been involved, as well as other ninjas/wizards/ninja-wizards who were not at the workshop.
Members of the Open Government Ninjas are organising NZ Open Govt Data Barcamp/Hackfest for the weekend of August 29 (which was mentioned in the NZ Herald):
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| NZ Open Govt Data Barcamp and Hackfest |
| Visit this group |
“The New Zealand Open Government Bar Camp is an “unconference” for people who are interested in making government-held data more freely available for others to re-use. An “unconference” is an alternative participant-driven event, that avoids aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.
Web 2.0 developments have shown the potential of combining data from different sources made freely available on the Internet. The government holds a huge range of non-personal data which could form the basis of innovative services and applications by others on the Internet.
You should come if you are interested in government information policy, explore ways to provide data, making entrepreneurial use of the Internet, or building working applications during a weekend.”
Keitha Booth, Clifton Chan, Vikram Kumar, Jason Ryan and myself will be eagerly in attendance, and we encourage others to join us.
Keeping up with Open Government and Open Data conversations
To make the task of keeping up with the multiple conversations now happening across Twitter, the Ninjas’ Forum, the Google Group, and other miscellaneous media I have created a Yahoo Pipe that aggregates this content (the Pipe is located at http://tr.im/uvrS where there are also embedding instructions. Alternatively, if you use an RSS aggregator, you can simply subscribe to the wedfeed):
3 Comments
Love the Yahoo! Pipe - nice work.
See everyone Sat 29th / Sun 30th at the National Library for both talking and doing.
I’ll be there too, just in case there are any legal questions that people might want to throw around regarding the release and re-use of information, data and copyright works, what it means (or doesn’t mean) when someone receives a copyright work under the OIA, whether “Crown copyright” is a licence (the answer is no it’s not), and all that jazz.
Indeed, if anyone would like an answer to commonly asked legal questions in this space, leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to provide the answer (without providing any legal advice of course).