Game changer: Open Government Directive puts new onus on agencies |
White House lays out new data transparancy mandates—with deadlines |
| The
Open Government Directive
that the Obama administration released today lays out several deadlines for agencies, all centered on making government data easy to access and use.
Within 45 days, agencies must make a minimum of three high-value data sets available to the public, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said today during a Web chat announcing the new directive. |
Digital rights groups are becoming increasingly concerned about the ACTA treaty negotiations because of the lack of detail being provided. Potentially it could change the legal status quo of ISPs/subscribers. ACTA talks hone in on ISP liability and downloads |
ISPs around the world may be forced to snoop on their subscribers and cut them off if they are found to have shared copyright-protected music on the internet, under the ACTA international agreement being promoted by the US. |
Under existing laws in the US, the EU and elsewhere, ISPs are granted immunity from prosecution for illegal activities carried out by subscribers across their networks. This new global trade agreement appears to contradict the legal status quo, said Michael Geist, a law professor at Ottawa University, Canada. |
“It is unprecedented for an IP treaty that impacts literally millions of people to be negotiated in such secrecy,” he said, adding that the US negotiating stance “runs counter to the Obama Administration’s commitment to transparency.” Read more at computerworld.co.nz |
Maths detected fraud in Canadian lotteries, undertaken opportunistically by lottery store clerks. A classic security case study of them having the three security factors: the motivation, the means, and the opportunity.
The fraud was detected by analysis of lottery winner data requested under a Freedom of Information type act , ie open data.
The fraud was not related to technology, but highlights the need to properly design business processes, to remove/reduce one of the factors. my involvement in a recent investigation into lottery fraud has convinced me that statistical analysis can indeed be used to uncover fraudulent behaviour that might otherwise pass undetected.
Many lottery players simply hand their tickets over to the local store clerk, asking if they have won anything. This opens the door for unscrupulous clerks to pretend that a winning lottery ticket won nothing (or just a tiny prize), then later claim the big lottery jackpot for themselves.
Does such fraudulent behaviour actually occur? |
It was clear that lottery sellers were winning significantly more major lottery prizes than could be accounted for by chance alone. The statistics proved the existence of widespread lottery fraud. |
| The probability of their winning 200 or more by pure luck alone would be unimaginably small — less than one chance in a trillion trillion trillion trillion.Read more at www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca |
ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 1: Linked Data |
| RWW: In a recent Design Issues note, you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you’d also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data - presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets? |
The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say ‘but actually I wanted to have XML.’ A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file. |
So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane, it’s the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it’s out there as Linked Data. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
How one firm turned government data into a business |
WASHINGTON — Through its data.gov effort, the White House wants to encourage more private sector use of government data. But turning this data into something useful is not necessarily going to be easy for either the government or the private sector, says one start-up, Panjiva Inc. Read more at www.computerworld.com |
| Our recommendations for increasing citizens’ access to government information |
In response to President Obama’s call for ideas on how to open up the government to its citizens, Google put forward recommendations last Friday in which we point to two simple steps government webmasters can take to make sure that search engine queries lead users to the right websites and hopefully, the right answers. |
First, agencies can adopt the Sitemaps protocol, which allow search engines to crawl websites more intelligently. Most search engines offer free Sitemap generator tools — check out Google Sitemap Generator. |
Second, agencies can review their robots.txt files. Many agencies currently block large portions of their websites from search engines with robots.txt files, sometimes unknowingly. By reviewing and selectively using these files, webmasters can easily open up large amounts of content to citizens. Free analysis tools like Google’s robots.txt test can help webmasters identify which pages are accidentally being blocked. |
The next stage in the campaign for open government will come when the Administration encourages agencies to publish their most popular, timely, and relevant data on their websites and data.gov. Static, obscure, and dated information is not useful to citizens who want data relevant to their everyday lives, nor is it helpful to third parties who want to build tools that citizens can use to understand that data. |
Heat goes on government for open data access |
Issues of payment and commercial reuse of data pose challenges |
| A small group of New Zealanders wanting to open up government data for use have started a website giving access to a number of datasets that they say are difficult to find through official sources. |
| The first project of opengovt.org.nz, the Open Data Catalogue, guides people to datasets that are created and maintained by government agencies, but are hard to access and subject to payment and/or restrictive licence agreements, dictating how the data can be redistributed, says principal Glen Barnes. Read more at computerworld.co.nz |
Issues arise because of the perceived risk of an improper relationship between a adult and a child. A solution is to send txts through a message hub that allows auditing (transparency). Teachers warned on texting
|
In a warning to secondary school principals, a member of the Teachers Council disciplinary tribunal has said: |
A number of teachers who have had inappropriate relationships with pupils have little understanding of professional boundaries. Many of them began their relationship as a result of text messaging. |
“We use text messages in our daily lives in a whole range of different ways, which means communication is much more effective and quick,” he said. |
“It’s one that is used particularly by students in an increasing way and there are lots of positive ways of using text messaging.” |
| Open Government on YouTube |
We announced earlier this week the launch of the U.S. Government Channel on YouTube, but that was just one of the announcements to come out of Washington this week on transparency and open government. The White House also announced the Open Government initiative, an effort to get citizens engaged in policy-making by opening up government data and soliciting feedback from people online. |
The two main projects launched with this initiative are data.gov and regulations.gov, sites where citizens can access public data and public comments on federal data and government operations. |
The government has also partnered with us to launch a special YouTube channel called OpenGov, where they distribute video content on the topic of open government. You can learn more in two of their first YouTube videos, posted by Valerie Jarrett and Vivek Kundra: |
Vivek Kundra, the USA’s first ever CIO, detailed the government’s upcoming Data.gov service in a conversation with Wired’s Nicholas Thompson at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference in Manhattan on Monday. When the site launches at month’s end, it will give American citizens an unprecedented level of information about our country. |
“The premise behind behind Data.gov goes to the philosophy around transparency and open government that the president has been talking about. What we want to do is democratize data and democratize information and put it in the public square,” said Kundra. “The default setting of the United States should not be that everything should be secret and closed.” Read more at www.wired.com |
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US Open Government Directive puts new onus on agencies
