Jed Sundwall from NetSquared pointed us to this and (quite rightly!) said it would be right up our street:
Activists call for a mashup-friendly Recovery.gov http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10150699-46.html The article also linked to this event from December 2008 at CATO Institute, for those of you who hadn't seen it: Just Give Us the Data! Prospects for Putting Government Information to Revolutionary New Uses http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=5475 <quote> Featuring Ed Felten, Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs and Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University; Gary D. Bass, Founder and Executive Director, OMB Watch; Jerry Brito, Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University; Moderated by Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute For all the change information technology has brought to society, the government sector lags behind in part because access to good data is lacking. A stable of private, non-profit, and volunteer efforts promise revolutionary change once they can access standardized, structured, and open government data. President-Elect Barack Obama made transparency a signature issue in the Senate, and talk of a "chief technology officer" in his administration often turns to whether that role might be as much a "chief transparency officer" What are the possibilities for open government data? What are the needs of the data user community? And what are the impediments to getting the data out there so that revolutionary change can get underway </quote> An MP3 recording of the event is available for download: http://www.catomedia.org/archive-2008/cpfa-12-10-08.mp3 J. _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
