open3.at

Bis 10. Dezember kann noch mittels würdiger Dichtkunst dem Thema Open Government gepriesen werden – solange läuft nämlich noch die Einreichfrist für den 1. weltweiten Open Government Poetry Contest. Zu gewinnen gibt es u.a. 1 Nokia N9 sowie weitere tolle Preise.

Aktuell gibt es bereits 23 Einreichungen, hier ein aktuelles Beipiel von Denise Recheis mit dem Titel “Aufbruchstimmung”:

Früher war es gar nicht selten
Dass Datensammler sehr viel gelten

Sie saßen auf dem hohen Ross
Hielten ihre Infos hinterm Schloss

Doch sind nicht wir es die euch Daten
Offenherzig und auch gern verraten?

Ist es richtig dass wir geben
Damit andere damit abheben?

Sollten wir nicht alle profitieren
Und keiner mehr dabei verlieren?

Was meinst du – das kann nicht sein?
Mit dieser Meinung bist du bald allein

Offne Daten das heißt teilen
Ein frommer Wunsch war das zuweilen

Aber heute, hier und jetzt
Wird das alte Spiel ersetzt

Nun kann jeder Daten nutzen
Und mit spannenden Ideen verduzen

Mit vielen coolen Apps und Dingen
Kann das Kunststück uns gelingen:
Freien Daten wir erzwingen
Um bis in die letzte Akte einzudringen

Es freut uns besonders, dass wir auch bereits internationale Einreichungen bekommen haben, z.B. “The 5 stars of Open Data” von Tom Kronenburg:

One star for the dataset, that can be found online,
In pdf or closed format, the’re read by eyes o’ mine.
Two stars, for the documents, a machine is keen to read,
Whether XLS or PPT, a datajourno’s feast!
Three stars for formats, that are readable by all,
and not a person needs to buy, from Redmonds’ Product Hall.
Four stars for the semantic set, URI-link defined
The data is as good as can, and will be datamined!

Five stars, to rule them all, Five stars to find them,
Five stars to link them all, and in the semweb bind them

Das Einreichformular für eigene Beiträge, alle bisherigen Einreichungen und eine Auflistung aller Preise gibt es auf der Contest-Seite unter http://open3.at/poetry-contest

Wir freuen uns über weitere Beiträge – wäre doch gelacht, wenn wir nicht 30 schaffen würden

open3.at und seine Projektpartner

• Donau-Universität Krems
• Falter
• Futurezone.at
• Monitor IT-Magazin
• OGD Austria

Im Rahmen des Gov2.0Camps am 2.12.2011 im Wiener Rathaus werde ich in einer Session mein WordPress-Plugin MapsMarker.com erstmals vorstellen. Dieses ermöglicht es, auf Basis des im Rahmen von OGD Wien freigegeben Stadtplans, Marker zu setzen, zu organisieren und anzuzeigen. Hier die Slides der Session mit ersten Screenshots:

Im Moment befindet sich das Plugin im Betatest, geplante Fertigstellung ist Mitte/Ende Dezember – je nachdem, wieviel Schlaf ich mir gönne Updates zum Plugin erfährt man jedenfalls am besten auf Twitter unter @MapsMarker

Governments around the world are increasingly relying on open licenses to release public sector information (PSI). A September 2011 report titled Costs and Benefits of Data Provision, prepared by John Houghton for the Australian National Data Service, examines the immediate and wider economic costs and benefits to making PSI available.

The key takeaway from the study: “the direct and measurable benefits of making PSI available free and unrestrictedly typically outweigh the costs. When one adds the longer-term benefits that we cannot fully measure, cannot even foresee, the case for open access appears to be strong.”

The report offers an interesting and instructive analysis about the overarching cost-saving potential of making PSI available online for free and under open licenses (we assume the figures to represent Australian dollars):

[W]e find that the net cost to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) of making publications and statistics freely available online and adopting Creative Commons licensing was likely to have been around $3.5 million per annum at 2005-06 prices and levels of activity, but the immediate cost savings for users were likely to have been around $5 million per annum. The wider impacts in terms of additional use and uses bring substantial additional returns, with our estimates suggesting overall costs associated with free online access to ABS publications and data online and unrestrictive standard licensing of around $4.6 million per annum and measurable annualised benefits of perhaps $25 million (i.e. more than five times the costs).

The Houghton study suggests that open licensing is a key component to reducing friction in the downstream use of PSI:

It is not simply about access prices, but also about the transaction costs involved. Standardised and unrestrictive licensing, such as Creative Commons, and data standards are crucial in enabling access that is truly open (i.e. free, immediate and unrestricted) … The efficient economic solution for the dissemination of PSI is likely to be free libre and free gratis (i.e. making it freely available online and using unrestrictive licensing such as Creative Commons).

In a separate internal document noted in the report, the Australian Bureau of Statistics described the impact of adopting CC licensing. It says that CC licensing “meets public expectations with regard to open government, facilitates data sharing (including across government), allows for more timely reuse of statistics, facilitates innovation, [and] makes sense to a growing percentage of people who recognise and understand CC licence symbols and conditions.”

The study urges us to try to understand and foster the unpredictable yet potentially powerful innovation that can be unleashed when PSI is made freely available online and released using unrestrictive licenses:

In the longer term, there may also be unforeseen uses and re-uses that simply cannot be accounted for, and again this may mean that the costs and benefits experienced in the early years of implementation tend to understate the longer-term advantages. Use and re-use can also have wider impacts, in terms of innovation and the development and introduction of new products, services and processes that, in turn, generate new economic economic activity, new business opportunities, better informed and potentially better government and business decisions.

The full report is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.

Timothy Vollmer, November 28th, 2011

reposted from https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/30470 /via @DirDigEng