Posted by
James McKinney on
Jul 07, 2011; 8:18pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/Toronto-Sun-Toronto-s-data-open-but-almost-useless-tp3414p3427.html
Yes, perhaps data vs. information, available vs. accessible are better
terms to use as Nik suggests.
What I'm pointing out is that open data is available to all (with an
Internet connection), but not accessible to all. Not everyone who
would benefit from open data is able to benefit from it, due to lack
of technical expertise, for example. Take, for example, open data on
the locations and other metadata for homeless shelters. Imagine that
through some telecenter initiative, a homeless person gets access to
the Shapefile published by the town of Podunk. Unless they happens to
have the technical skills, they can't benefit from it. If some
well-meaning developer made an iPhone app plotting the nearest
homeless shelters on a map, they'll probably never see it. An example
effective route to making this data accessible to homeless people
would be for some local NGO (or the government itself) to take that
data and print a map to distribute.
The debate is whether government should make data both available and
accessible, or to just make it available and rely on NGOs, developers
and others to make it accessible, i.e. designed and structured so as
to be usable by the broad public. Hope that clarifies what I meant!
On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 3:07 PM, Nik G <
[hidden email]> wrote:
> Wouldn't it be great to agree not to define another new term? 'Data' and
> 'Information' are good enough. Public = Publically Available is hopefully
> obvious too :)
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Glen Newton
> Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2011 2:53 PM
> To: civicaccess discuss
> Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss]Toronto Sun: Toronto’s data open but
> almost useless
>
> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 2:30 PM, James McKinney <
[hidden email]>
> wrote:
>>
>> I defined my use of public data as "open data that is
>> citizen-ready", i.e. usable by all stakeholders.
>
> 1 - It is not clear to me what "citizen-ready" means
> 2 - "usable by all stakeholders" makes it even less clear to me
>
> Could you explain what you mean by "citizen-ready"? The way you are
> using it suggests it should be obvious to me. :-)
> I think getting consensus (if possible) on the definition would be a
> useful thing.
>
> Thanks,
> Glen
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 2:30 PM, James McKinney <
[hidden email]>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Nik G <
[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>> While I agree with you that we're disagreeing on terms, it's also
>>> important
>>> to point out that it's not really "Public vs Open" data discussion. You
>>> probably read Melanie Chernoff's article on the differences
>>>
>>> (
http://opensource.com/government/10/12/what-%E2%80%9Copen-data%E2%80%9D-means-%E2%80%93-and-what-it-doesn%E2%80%99t),
>>
>> Just read the article. I am not using "public data" to mean "publicly
>> available data". I defined my use of public data as "open data that is
>> citizen-ready", i.e. usable by all stakeholders. There is no commonly
>> agreed-upon meaning for "public data", and perhaps there is a better
>> term for the meaning that I intend. In any case, I think you would
>> agree that this is in fact a "public vs open" discussion, in my usage.
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