Open-Data-2

Data about public sector spending is often hard to understand and compare. Statistics about government is often presented in tables. In this hack I have used open data from Eurostat (the EU statistics agency) about government expenditure for a set of countries and rendered sets of boxes in a Minecraft world. This makes it possible to explore the data by walking (flying) around the world. Boxes for expenditure data is ordered as General public services, Defence, Public order and safety, Economic affairs, Environment protection, Housing and community amenities, Health, Recreation culture and religion, Education, Social protection. ...

As open data is gaining momentum an increasing number of organizations are thinking about ways to make their data available for others to use. Here are some thought on how to approach design issues when making open government data available. TL;DR See if it is possible to publish your open data as file dumps instead of building advanced API:s that force entrepreneurs to integrate their apps with your infrastructure. A fictional background It was supposed to be a regular day for John at the server facility at the government weather agency. But when he came in to work that morning his colleague Mike was in a panic. -“Look! We are in the middle of a DDoS attack. The API-server is flooded and the database server is on it’s knees. The meteorologists can not work” . John started looking at server logs. Between 7 and 8 a.m. there was a sharp increase in traffic. Loads of API calls were made from a lot of different IP:s. Then, all of a sudden server load decreased and everything was back to normal. ...

A small visualization hack for the Eurostat Hackday on december 16.

On september 4-5 we had our first open data hack day here in Sweden called Codemocracy. The event was a success (thank you Martin Svalin!) with close to 50 participants hacking away at various data sets. I did an intro on the state of open data but tried to keep it short so that everyone could start coding as soon as possible. On Sunday there were 12 teams presenting their apps. Some of the teams had used public transport data made available by the Viktoria Institute but many were scraping government websites for lack of proper API:s. In the 24 hours set aside for the competition the following apps were created: ...

Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation participated in a conference of the Communia project, a European thematic network on the digital public domain. In a great post about the meeting at the OKFN blog, he recommends two improvements to the current PSI work; 1: Broaden the scope of the PSI Directive to include publicly funded cultural heritage organisations and 2: Broaden the evidence base for opening up PSI. A third recommendation An important value of public sector information is the increased transparency in government decision making. A European Union directive only affects member states and not EU institutions. We are therefore at risk of missing out on increased transparency in EU institutions that the PSI directive may bring to governments in the member states. Also, government transparency is often considered to be a contributing factor in reducing corruption. ...