Proposal | reboot10 – 4 comments
Government as a Platform
How to bring about the transformation towards free government data from the bottom up?
Peter Parkes has suggested a discussion on the macro impact of free availability of government data under the subheading of "What's Ours Should Be Ours" and is calling for supplemental discussion about the logistics of such freedom. Such a forum would have both technical and very practical implications.
An open question in this regard is how to bring about such change through activism? How would citizens urge the change of the status quo? And, even more pointedly, how should the practical visionaries *do this* rather than just talk about it? Is it possible to start along the path of public data freedom even without the explicit involvement of central government?
Inspiration:
www.reboot.dk/artefact-4044-en.html
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/government_as_a_platform.php
www.freeourdata.org.uk/
www.version2.dk/artikel/7059
www.kimbach.org/2008/05/23/oio-rest-restful-web-services-developed-by-the-danish-public-sector
4 comments
I vote to combine
Does that work for you, Steffen?
I second a combination
In fact the examples I linked in here fit well under the heading of your macro discussion.
Folkets Ting
Folkets Ting is an example of taking back data from the government by screen scraping web sites. I've put up a separate proposal: www.reboot.dk/page/22791/en
Another screen scraping example could be tedbot, where we are a taking back EU public procurement contracts for academic study (i.e. to work out if the inner market actually works). Normally you have to pay a lot of money to access this data. I've written a blog post about how I reverse engineered the login process: friism.com/downloading-the-eu
We've built a crude Google Maps demonstration to show the contracts working across national borders: tedbot.itu.dk/
... and created a small video showing the EU expanding by plotting purchasing authorities over time: vimeo.com/1911082
I'd love to share this at reboot
Combine
www.reboot.dk/artefact-4044-en.html
do you want to combine sessions or?