opensociety

A call on Transatlantic Civil Society Dialogues EU-USA is still open! The application deadline is 27 May 2010.

Having a terms-of-service agreement with these new media providers will make it easier for government agencies to create pages and use them to dramatically increase access to information, offer education on government services, and further empower citizens to interact with government.

We, the citizens, through the state, pay for the production of academic books and research papers twice, first through salaries and research grants, and second through the purchase of books and journal subscriptions. This is how the the most fundamental principles of academia, to study and to share its findings, are obstructed, and its operation is made far more expensive and cumbersome.

It's not your traditional ROI model. Back to the culture, it supports the fact that you don't need a hard number at the end of the day. It's the right thing to do, we want to listen to our customers, so let's do it.

... you get the whole funnel of ideas and it's a challenge as to how to disperse them. Everybody has full-time jobs. We make further strides every day in getting reporting and getting everything set up so people can get engaged, on the site and just with the information. To me, that's the hard part. And it goes back to making sure we're listening, making sure we're closing the feedback loop.

Their collaborative agreement on what's most important floats to the top for everyone to see. So you can easily see which are the most popular ideas and which ideas are new, should people want to jump on in and vote on those.

This document is a best practices guide for governments embracing the notion of "open data". It discusses why open government data is beneficial to society, i.e. how it is civic capital, and what kinds of technological considerations must be made when making government data open.

From an official and public service point of view information providers want openness biased towards information access. One tends to encourage participation, but this is understood as mechanisms facilitating feedback, not as tools making the public producers of content. From a commercial point of view information providers also want to facilitate easy access, but these actors also have strong interests in encouraging openness with users acting as producers of content. These actors are more likely to develop an understanding of the “quality of information” with a bias towards information’s ability to appeal and engage an audience