Posted by
David Eaves on
Jul 07, 2011; 8:31pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/Toronto-Sun-Toronto-s-data-open-but-almost-useless-tp3414p3428.html
My take on reading the article is that it is a question of having
the data in multiple formats - some of which are easier for people
to engage with, although I'm doubtful about what that means for
accessibility. Indeed, I've no idea what accessible means. Being
able to look at data points in a google map doesn't magically make
the data accessible - it means you can look at it, but you may be in
no better position to draw conclusions, analyze or mash it up with
something else then you were before. Take the city of Toronto's
Wellbeing site. This seems to conform well with the definition of
accessible that is being used in this discussion. The problem is...
none of the data is open (not it even in the "not" open way data
shared on toronto.ca/open is). It simple is not being shared at all.
This means all people can do is look at the data, no one can do
anything with it. (My understanding is there plan is to eventually
add this data to the toronto.ca/data portal, which would be great).
Again, feels to me like we are mostly splitting hairs but personally
if I have to choose I'm going to advocate for open data over
accessible data because
a) accessible is poorly defined here - accessible to do what? What
is the use case, they are potentially infinite so is the city
supposed to enable all of them; and
b) I can at least (yes, I many need to beg, pay or borrow) make open
data accessible. However, often you cannot make accessible data
open.
Could the city of Toronto do more, definitely. Would publishing
their data sets in multiple formats be better, definitely. So let's
encourage governments to do both... but I'd need to get a better
understanding of what accessible data means before I'd begin
thinking about advocating it before open data.
On 11-07-07 1:18 PM, James McKinney wrote:
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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