Hello Skeptic, I hope all

guerino1 — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 14:46:10 +0000

Hello Skeptic,

I hope all finds you and the community well.

I believe any attempt to make data public and open is good. However, I have a couple of questions...

1) What defines "public data"?

2) How much of this is truly the responsibility of a government and, if it a government's responsibility, which government will act as the Single Source of Truth (SSoT) for all public data?

3) Given that governments exist because of our taxes and spend our taxes to run themselves in a manner that represents the taxpayers, is spending our taxes on becoming a source for public data a wise thing to do, especially in light of how many other problems exist that governments need to solve?

I personally love the idea of open and public information, which is why I put so much time into IF4IT. However, I'd have to question whether or not the material published by a site like ours should be part of a government platform. First, in my opinion the magnitude of what can be considered public data is huge and I don't believe that its the mandate of any government to help with the collection, publishing and managing of such a superset. Also, if government employees are spending as much time as we do trying to create, publish and manage such information, are they really representing our taxes wisely, since there are so many governmental problems that need to be solved for the taxpayers? Unless a government publishing and maintaining such information leads to more efficient government, less taxes and a better quality of life for the taxpayers, I'd have to question whether or not the government was keeping with its fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayer.

I do have to say that I like the Public Data Transparency Principles and I certainly don't have any issue with there being one government organization that acts as an owner for all public data used by that government and all its sub-governments (UK manages data for itself and all regional and town governments). However, it still doesn't address the issue of which government would be the SSoT for all "peer" governments (UK, US, China, Japan, India, etc.)

Your thoughts?

My Best

Frank

The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT)
Open IT Standards & Best Practices

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "TSO embraces open public information"

Hello Skeptic, I hope all