open data principles as law proposal

PublicMarkup.org

Very relevant initiative by the Sunlight Foundation.
Of course, legal enforcement is not the only way to obtain transparency.
There are also “soft” measures, such as the open method of coordination and benchmarking :)

This entry was posted on April 18, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “open data principles as law proposal”

  1. John Wonderlich Says:
    April 18, 2008 at 10:04 pm

    Can you say what it means for open coordination and benchmarking to provide alternatives for creating open government?

    As one of those responsible for putting publicmarkup.org together, I’m very interested in what you’ve got in mind.

  2. osimod Says:
    April 19, 2008 at 11:54 am

    John, thanks for your interest.
    On eGovernment and in other areas, the European Commission has no competence as power lies with the Member States.
    In these areas, the EC operates through soft measures, not by regulation. Benchmarking shows laggards and champions, thereby encouraging policy choices through public exposure.
    In concrete, for eGovernment: rankings proved effective in stimulating the Member States to invest in online service provision (tax declaration etc.).
    The idea of this blog is to design a new benchmarking method that measures (= encourages) the online availability of public data in machine readable format.
    See previous entry http://egov20.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/benchmarking-egov20-first-proposal-on-transparency/

    I am preparing now a paper on this, which I will certainly send you for comments.

  3. John Wonderlich Says:
    April 22, 2008 at 5:51 pm

    Thanks for the response and the paper, I’m very happy to be aware of your work. You may wish to look into two American equivalents of things you mention. First, the Open House Project (which I organize) is a collaborative effort to create public access online to congressional information. http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/

    Second, there was an effort in the US to create standards for executive information access, through the “Citizens Service Levels Interagency Committee”. This has been replaced by a coordinating community, but their research may be of interest to you.
    http://www.usaservices.gov/communities/cslic.php

    Please let me know if I can be of help. Thanks!

    -John Wonderlich

Leave a Reply