OG: Open Government

It's rare that I get to sit in a room with 30 heavyweights -- including O'Reilly, Lessig and Malamud -- and talk about the one thing that interests me most: government transparency.

Regular readers of this space -- you are brave souls -- know that my thesis covers transparent public policy mechanisms in our increasingly digitized and networked democracy (using e-voting as a critical case). This past Friday and Saturday at O'Reilly Media in Sebastopol, I sat down with 29 other like-minded government transparency geeks to think about what Open Government and Open Government Data should look like. We completed a draft request for comments on a set of principles for Open Government Data. In short:

Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that is: complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary and license-free. Compliance must be reviewable.

Each of these eight principles has two levels of granularity: a single sentence defining each principle and an extensive discussion about the nitty gritty of each principle. See those definitions here at Carl's site: "RFC: 8 Principles of Open Government Data"

All of us shared a desire to catalyze the production, dissemination and manipulation of rich data streams from government sources. From my perspective, I'd like to find ways to convince government entities to do things in ways that allow for copious downstream reuse without impacting other notions of efficiency, privacy, security and privilege (e.g., deliberative and attorney/client information). The tough nut to crack in many cases are types of proprietary restrictions including intellectual property protections and contract-related terms. It would seem like a good place for regulation; that is, while FOIA and its state equivalents go a long way, we need to craft a legislative structure that will make it crystal clear that agencies are obligated to provide streams of certain kinds of data and that businesses must relinquish, in certain cases, vague claims of trade secrecy placed on information submitted to government agencies.