There is a movement afoot globally for governments to provide open access to their public data, so that organisations and citizens may create meaning and value from these often huge but inaccessible data sources. It’s part of what is being called “Gov 2.0″. After following the movement in the UK through initiatives such as Show Us a Better Way, and in the US with heavy support from the Obama administration, it’s been taking off in Australia with the launch of the Government 2.0 Taskforce and their Mashup Australia competition. We’re right behind this because opening up data allows us to expose information to uncover truths, provide valuable services, and promote transparency and accountability in government – the very lifeblood of a working democracy (along with great Design of course!).
To show what can be done when a UX focussed design agency gets its mitts on government data we entered the Mashup Australia competition and built Get Stimulated. The website is a quick and dirty prototype (done in under 150 hours!) that allows Australians to quickly see how funding from the government’s Economic Stimulus Plan is being spent in their local area. With 6.4 million dollars of your money being spent around the county, wouldn’t you like to see how your local area has been stimulated?
Mashup Australia
Mashup Australia is a competition launched by the Government 2.0 Taskforce to provide a practical demonstration of the benefits that open access to Australian public sector information can provide. The contest will showcase how something as simple as, for example, the locations of government services or census data, can deliver benefits to the research, commercial and community sectors – and to citizens at large.
The majority of the site was built over just one weekend at the Open Australia Hackfest “Mashup Australia” edition, at the Google headquarters in Darling Harbour, an event to get people together to build mashups with government datasets. Similar events were run in Melbourne and Canberra, including the all night GovHack. The fact that people spent their weekends and stayed up well past 4 am to finish their projects shows just how hungry citizens are to work with government to provide value from these datasets.
Open Access and Open Formats
Open access means access on terms and in formats that permit and enable use and reuse. For example, making datasets available under a Creative Commons license rather than the standard “all rights reserved” copyright.
Making datasets open access and available in open formats (such as RDF, XML or KML), makes it easier for others to use and “mashup” data to build applications and visualisations. There is already a lot of public data published online, but often in unfriendly formats, not many people would enjoy scrolling through 4,000 rows of an excel spreadsheet!
Opening up government data creates an opportunity for others to make that data more meaningful to all.
