Open Access

Although some government information is still clouded in secrecy, governments ARE increasingly using the Internet to give citizens more open access to some of their data.



MP3 File

This is a follow-up to our podcast on the "Digital Economy", in which we discussed initiatives by the Australian and US governments to tap into the Internet to help develop their economies.

One aspect of this is providing open access to public sector information, i.e. providing free access to information collected by government agencies.

Examples

Some agencies have been doing this for ages - it's part of their
mission.

The Bureau of Meteorology provides weather forecasts and historical climate data. Chris has a widget in his tool-bar that displays Perth's current weather conditions, five day forecast and radar map retrieved from the BOM server.

Transperth (WA public transport utility) provides bus, Train & Ferry timetables, fairs, route planners on their web-site. Also integrated into Google maps.

Fuelwatch gives us petrol prices in WA.

More recently...

The Australian Bureau of Statistics adopted the Creative Commons 2.5 license for its data sets.

German Federal and State agencies donated 350,000 pictures to Wikipedia under the CC3.0 attribution+share-alike license.

MIT announced all faculty publications would be made open access (usually copyright is signed over to journal publishers).

Caveats

An important consideration in the publication of [government] data sets, is respect for privacy and security. An article in Computer World found on-line government records the richest source of personal information (social security number, address, occupation, image of signature etc.)

Often the government's heart isn't really in it - it's more about political window-dressing, e.g www.GroceryChoice.gov.au

Conclusion

If information is power then more power to governments who open access to their public sector information.