[Aust-NZ] Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data

[Robert Coup]

Hi Rob,

Good points - comments/questions inline...

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 2:35 PM, Rob Atkinson <robatkinson101 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 1) There should be a general position regarding accountability, like
> the intention (but not current practice!) of FOI laws, that taxpayer
> funded activities should support free and open access for
> non-commercial use to relevant information. This includes all spatial
> information, with the well understood exceptions of personal private
> details and national security. Specifically there should be a
> presumption of public interest, *with only commercial exploitation
> restricted.*


What do you mean by commercial exploitation here? If BigCo wants to resell
free and publicly accessible data for $100K per user per year and can find
suckers to sign up for that, whats the problem?

2) There should not be a technical cost associated in accessing data -
> i.e. it should not be bound to a proprietary on in-house custom
> technology.  FOSS has an obvious role in providing a baseline for what
> is thus acceptable - there should be an onus on data access methods to
> provide a FOSS reference implementation, and this should apply
> automatically. Critically we mustnt contemplate building private data
> distribution arrangements without a commensurate capability to make
> the same data visible and accessible using open standards and
> licenses.


Standards are the key things here imo, if the data is available in standard
formats or through standard service interfaces then it doesn't matter what
software is in use to deliver it. Whether governments should be
using/preferring Open Source Software is a different topic from providing
open access to public information. I'd much prefer data released today in
any format, than in five years via a standard format. Governments (and all
of us) should be striving to push standards but getting data out there is
more important than getting it in the "right" form.

Looks like Victoria is heading in healthy directions though :)

Other Rob.
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