Complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, license-free
These are eight principles to follow in releasing government data, recommended by the public to inform President Obama’s Open Government Initiative.
The Open Government Brainstorm event was the first of three phases of public comment hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration to elicit suggestions for more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government.
An abridged list of recommendations resembles the emerging principles of the NolaStat reform:
- Adopt 8 Open Government Data Principles (complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, license-free);
- Crowdsourcing should be adopted as a principle and best practices around the use of crowdsourcing to evaluate data should be established;
- Create an Office of Open Government;
- Establish a Transparency Officer/Open Government Officer and interdisciplinary team in each agency whose job it is to inventory and proactively make data available to the public. Transparency officer must not be an information technology expert only but someone knowledgeable about legal frameworks, such as Privacy and Information Quality;
- Create a data governance program/framework in each agency to evaluate data quality and priorities;
- Seek public input on data to be made transparent;
- Use visualization tools to show timeliness of FOIA processing in real time and track which official has responsibility for the request at any given time, i.e. workflow management;
- Post frequently requested categories of information;
The full set of policy recommendations are broad, and extremely well-considered, demonstrating the wisdom of using public comment to create a more robust transformation of government.
[...] at every level of government should be published on the Internet with a presumption of openness, in “complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprieta… [...]