Re: project objectives

Posted by Hugh McGuire on Mar 17, 2006; 2:30pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/del-icio-us-tagging-tp359p360.html

Hi folks,

Met with Mike Lenczner the other day and we had a long talk about
civicaccess.ca; he encouraged me to share these thoughts.

As a "founding member" of civicaccess, I still have great difficulty
understanding what the exact objectives of the project are, and why the
objectives are important. I have my own ideas about that, but in my
opinion what we have written is not yet clear enough - to me, and
certainly not to a beurocrat in ottawa.

This is really important for several reasons:
1. attracting people to the project: a clear objective will help people
decide whether they wish to join
2. focusing the project:  in asking whether we should do this, or that,
it's nice to have a clear objective which lets you decide which project
is more important.
3. selling the idea to the people in power (ie government & beurocrats &
media) - to convince them that gov't should let go of their data. To me,
this will be the MOST difficult task. We need to have a clearly
articulated objective; and a convincing case, to beat the tendency in
government for cost-recovery.

So, what is our objective? and why do we have that objective. I would
say our objective is:

OUR OBJECTIVE:
1. to get free and open access to all civic data from all levels
(federal, provincial, municipal) of Canadian governments

OUR REASONS:
1. the data belongs to citizens
2. to foster innovative projects and uses of civic data among citizens
3. to alllow citizens to help build solutions to probelms themselves
4. to generate more citizen engagement in the democratic process
5. ???

OUR CAVEAT:
1. we want access to aggregate/anonymous data, not to information about
private citizens. We have no interest in violating the privacy of
citizens.

Note these are just my thoughts/proposal. I know we went through
something like this already, but to me the end result on the wiki was
not clear enough.

Hugh.