Is Government a Data Wholesaler or Retailer?
sunlightlabs.com
sunlightlabs.com
Secondly, if we adopt the proposed solution we get a situation very ripe for corruption and rent seeking. What you will get is the government creating data in some bizarre and byzantine format which only one or two companies can decipher, and those companies will sell better organized data at very high prices and in very limited way.
This is already happening now, btw. All laws and published court decisions are supposed to be public knowledge and available for free. But the government does not have an efficient system to publish them. Therefore, two companies (Lexis and Westlaw) publish these on-line and charge people enormous amounts of money so that they can merely find out what the laws of their own country are.
Simialar things are happening in other spheres, where people are paying a lot of money for supposedly public information.
So, no, the government should try to make public information accessible to all citizens. Of course it should also provide data in bulk to anyone that wants it, but that does not release them from their duty to make the information accessible to the average citizen.
First of all, the analogy with Costco is false. Data is free to copy (esp. govt data which should not be subject to copyright) and very cheap to store and transport.
Data is only cheap to copy when it's, you know, available to be copied. The whole point of the article is that it currently isn't, but is instead buried in small sites that focus on presentation and analysis. That's the analogy that you seem to have completely missed - the government should act like Costco, making their data available in bulk, but instead, they act like bodegas, giving little snippets.
What you will get is the government creating data in some bizarre and byzantine format which only one or two companies can decipher....This is already happening now
You act as if accessible data standards aren't a part of what the open government movement is lobbying for. Why, exactly, do you think someone who wants data to be more commonly available would stop and be happy if it were only made available in some obscure proprietary format?
That does not release them from their duty to make the information accessible to the average citizen.
The article specifically says that we're talking about priorities, that the warehouse needs to come first. As for "their duty to make information accessible to the average citizen", isn't it great how often that currently comes with a healthy dose of political spin? I know I trust every little chart the government's handing me.
Is that really the problem? If that is the problem, one can easily write an app that gathers a lot of these little snippets and assembles them in any way one wants. In fact that would be easier, than writing a bunch of articles and trying to change how the government does things. Or is the problem that the government wants to provide data to the target user directly and somebody else wants to be the middle man.
"You act as if accessible data standards aren't a part of what the open government movement is lobbying for."
That article did not mention anything about accessible data standards. It also did not mention the "open government movement" at all. Hey if there is something called an "open government movement" and it wants accessible data standards more power to them (especially if "accessible" means open and not "accessible for a fee"). But again, I don't know why this is relevant as neither was mentioned by the article.
"Why, exactly, do you think someone who wants data to be more commonly available would stop and be happy if it were only made available in some obscure proprietary format?"
Well, here is an example, that someone might not want data to be more commonly available to everyone, they might want data to be more commonly available to them and not to everyone else so that they can insert themselves as a middle man between the data provider (government) and the data consumer. This is the only way the Costco analogy of the original article actually makes sense.
"The article specifically says that we're talking about priorities, that the warehouse needs to come first."
Yes of course the warehouse needs to come first. And then, if you are good middleman and know how to deal with government you can ensure that nothing of much importance comes later.
I don't know, maybe I am cynical. Maybe these guys really care for transparency and want government to start releasing data in bulk so that as much data as possible gets released as cheaply as possible. So maybe I am wrong.
Then again maybe not. If you wanted open government above all you would not mind much about exactly what format the data came in.
And the fact that you just flamed me and accused me of trolling out of the blue, makes me even more doubtful the motives of the original article's drafter are honest.
It would have taken you 30 seconds to click the 'About Us' link at the top of the page and learn that Sunlight Labs is "an open source development team that builds technology to make government more transparent and accountable." Instead, you chose to come up with an insane conspiracy theory.
Approximately 80 data sets from across 32 City agencies and commissions may be made available on NYC.gov, including such categories as citywide events, property records and sales information, recreational facility directories and restaurant inspection information.
But, we'll know when we see the actual data not some press-release... Also, where is the really useful data including health, and transit? I almost wish there was a federal standard of some sort.