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UK open government data: the results of the official audit

not yet systematically assessed the costs and benefits of the Government's specific transparency initiatives

Government departments reckon on spending from £53,000 to £500,000 each year on just providing and publishing open data

This document presents highlights of the Metadata Management Survey results. It helps to understand the current state of affairs with regards to Metadata Management in the EU Member States.

The use of open source software, cloud computing technologies, and an integrated approach to search, video, and social media seems almost common-place in industry these days. Yet government websites aren’t quite there with the exception of a few noteable exceptions (not an exhaustive list by any means). This is why I’m so excited about that NASA has recently released an RFI (Request for Information) for information on how to build a better public website nasa.gov and intranet insdie.nasa.gov. This is a really big step for NASA, but,we truly need your help.

Substantial businesses have long "re-purposed" what's available from court proceedings, census publications, CIA atlases, and agency scientific and commercial compilations. It seems plausible that release of, say, crime statistics in Cook County, or water flows of the Colorado River, will be valuable to someone. Which datasets are worth processing first, though?

Specialists widely believe what European Commission VP Neelie Kroes and others have said: "Your data is worth more if you give it away." As with many other IT issues, though the people in the best position to make such measurements are too busy creating the future to invest time rigorously justifying it.

The Whitehouse CIO has released a strategy, entitled "Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People", providing federal agencies with a 12-month plan that focuses on

I find business cases for data publishers much more compelling than examples of how open data can be used. For a start, I don’t think it’s possible to predict how open data will be used or what that will mean in terms of economic or societal impact: the wide world into which it’s released is just too complex to know.

One argument I’ve heard made about government open data is that releasing it can help organisations avoid the costs of Freedom of Information requests.

The reverse of cost avoidance is finding sponsors for open data publication.

1) Is there a download button?

2) Data should always be linked to the derivative works created with it.

3) Downloading should never be more than two clicks away (ideally one).

My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country. The startup country, let's say the size of modern day Israel, would be designed from the ground up for efficiency.

The entire banking system would be automated. There would be no cash in the start-up country. You wouldn't need to "apply" for a loan because the virtual bank would always have a current notion of your credit-worthiness.

The tax code in the startup country would be simplified to the point where residents might forget it exists.

Google Caffeine — the remodeled search infrastructure rolled out across Google's worldwide data center network earlier this year — is not based on MapReduce, the distributed number-crunching platform that famously underpinned the company's previous indexing system. As the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft work to duplicate MapReduce through the open source Hadoop project, Google is moving on.

A new Single Market to deliver the benefits of the digital era

Improve ICT standard-setting and interoperability

Enhance trust and security

Wikileaks (website) publishes documents that show a plan to curb the free software in the European Union.

This file shows that Jonathan Zuck, president of Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) –an organization with close ties to Microsoft–, and founder of Americans for Technology Leadership, had influenced the change of working documents of the European Union.

This publication shows how pressure groups influence or attempt to influence the decisions made by the European institutions, but in this case is particularly striking one of these groups trying to influence against free software (ACT) has close ties Microsoft,

Measurements of the collective public mood derived from millions of tweets can predict the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average up to a week in advance with an accuracy approaching 90 percent

Create a management framework that accepts and rewards internal entrepreneurs.

Government 2.0 is a citizen-centric philosophy and strategy that believes the best results are usually driven by partnerships between citizens and government, at all levels.  It is focused entirely on achieving goals through increased efficiency, better management, information transparency, and citizen engagement and most often leverages newer technologies to achieve the desired outcomes.

Government employees are traditionally risk-averse, a good thing when the pace of change is relatively slow.  However, in today's fast-paced world the pace of government change, the pace of government execution is often too slow.