Page 1392 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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… in order to promote greater participation in Australia’s democracy, it is committed to open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government health information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology.
This is the sort of thing I would like to see the ACT government sign on to also. Paragraph (1)(c) states:
… as a general rule, government information should follow the standards in Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0 adopted by the Commonwealth Government and be:
(a) free …
As I have said before, this information has already been paid for by the ACT taxpayers and they should not be charged again. Paragraph (1)(c)(ii) says that the information should be easily discoverable. There is no point in having information if you cannot find it. A lot of this comes down to the design of websites, which is where they tend to be published. Speaking as someone who spends an awful lot of time on the ACTPLA website, for instance, there is a lot of information on there which very few people will ever find. In fact, we have the situation—as I tell people and they tell me—where people should use Google to search ACTPLA’s website. Using ACTPLA’s own search, you simply will not find most things. Websites, if badly used, can be a way for government to conceal information. In (iii) we say that information should be:
(iii) based on open standards and therefore machine-readable …
What we need to have for datasets are standards that all people can read and that will not go out of date in a few years time. It is particularly important because most of our information these days is electronic information. We run the risk that we will not have archives of our information that are useable in 10 or 20 years because we will have had important information stored in formats which were not based on an open standard. The standard will no longer be available and they will not be machine readable. This is needed for the long-term viability of information storage, to say nothing of short-term usability of information. In (iv) we say information should be:
(iv) properly documented and therefore understandable …
If you have information, you need to know what it refers to. Are we talking about kilograms? Are we talking about litres? Are we talking about whatever? Documentation is important. It needs to be licensed to permit free reuse and transformation by others. The commonwealth government task force proposed that the commonwealth government use the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia as its default licence. In summary, that licence says—and it is a little bit more complicated—that anything under this licence you are free to share. You can copy, distribute and transmit the work. You can remix and you can adapt the work. But it states under “Under the following conditions”—and this is the major condition:
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