Open Data, Open Governance

Published November 7, 2013

This article was published a really long time ago.

Its value then was likely questionable. Its value now is certainly pure nostalgia.

Tonight I swung by my old uni for a talk on Open Data and Open Governance by Pia Waugh.

It was interesting to hear what is being done by the Australian government to make open the data it collects and produces. I generally got the feeling we're at least heading in the right direction, and generally that feeling was given by words like de-identified public data being coupled with words like API.

Other interesting things from the talk:

A paragraph from the Coalition's plan for the digital economy and e-Government:

Seek to ensure every Government interaction that occurs more than 50,000 times per year can be achieved online by 2017. Video-conferencing via technologies such as WRTC will be an acceptable substitute for physical proximity in most cases.

This website: http://www.openaustralia.org/

The fact it can be easier to make information public than to share between government departments. And that can be an all round good thing.

This hackathon that you probably already know about: GovHack

And that http://data.gov.au/ will be taking requests for data sets as of next week.