Last Friday Gloria Galloway and Bill Curry ran an excellent piece about how the government’s promise to strengthen Canada’s access-to-information laws is now five years old. It is of course all so laughable it is sad. Here we have an issue that the public is universally supportive of – making government more transparent and accountable [...]
Entries from October 2010
How you know a government is broken
World Bank Discussion on Open Data – lessons for developers, governments and others
Yesterday the World Bank formally launched its Apps For Development competition and Google announced that in addition to integrating the World Bank’s (large and growing) data catalog into searches, it will now do it in 34 languages. What is fascinating about this announcement and the recent changes at the bank is it appears to be [...]
How Governments misunderstand the risks of Open Data
When I’m asked to give a talk about or consult on policies around open data I’ve noticed there are a few questions that are most frequently asked: “How do I assess the risks to the government of doing open data?” or “My bosses say that we can only release data if we know people aren’t [...]
Rethinking Freedom of Information Requests: from Bugzilla to AccessZilla
Last week I gave a talk at the Conference for Parliamentarians hosted by the Information Commission as part of Right to Know Week. During the panel I noted that, if we are interested in improving response times for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests (or, in Canada, Access to Information (ATIP) requests) why doesn’t the Office [...]
UK Adopts Open Government License for everything: Why it’s good and what it means
In the UK, the default is open. Yesterday, the United Kingdom made an announcement that radically reformed how it will manage what will become the government’s most important asset in the 21st century: knowledge & information. On the National Archives website, the UK Government made public its new license for managing software, documents and data [...]
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