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The General Services Administration (GSA) announced on May 21 that Data.Gov partnering with the Government of India National Informatics Centre has produced an open source version of Data.gov

The General Services Administration (GSA) announced on May 21 that Data.Gov partnering with the Government of India National Informatics Centre has produced an open source version of Data.gov that is being made available today, the third anniversary of Data.gov. The open source product, called the Open Government Platform (OGPL), can be downloaded and evaluated by any national Government or state or local entity as a path toward making their data open and transparent

The Open Government Platform (OGPL) is a growing set of open source, open government platform code that allows any city, organization, or government to create an open data site

Social computing will continue to grow in government, but won't hit critical mass in 2010.

Don't forget that there was some clamping down on social media in government during 2009 including the Marines restricting access to services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. Progress in 2010 will be better in state and to a lesser extent local government. The federal government will also struggle with a consistent policy and approach for internal and external social computing, which probably won't emerge next year.

Open data goes back to the drawing board. I've been bullish on open data and APIs for years and the government got religion in 2009 with data.gov. But the usage is down as government workers and businesses realize that the data is often far out-of-date and not in forms that can be used operationally.

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

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases.

you can read how the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica and data.gov.uk have used it

CDU-Politiker Michael Kretschmer versucht aus der starren Abwehrhaltung der Union in der Internetpolitik auszubrechen

Die Politik müsste weniger Regulierung und mehr Freiräume für Innovation schaffen – sowie flexible Förderinstrumente für kleine und kleinste Software-Unternehmen und zivilgesellschaftliche Initiativen im Bereich IT.

Wenn Kretschmer es schaffen könnte, die Union für ein data.gov.de zu bewegen, wäre aber auch schon viel gewonnen.

The report finds that 3 key groups or ‘layers’ were crucial to the successful introduction of open data. An influential and active civil society provided the ‘bottom up’ pressure for change through traditional advocacy and by setting up innovative websites demonstrating how open information could be used. Civil servants and state and federal administrators who saw open data as a way of improving efficiency provided the ‘middle layer’. Finally, high-level political leaders including Heads of States and Ministers provided the third layer.