Towards an Open Data City Census for Australia
What does a well organised open data movement look like at city council level? Perhaps like this: http://us-city.census.okfn.org/
<p>aoeu</p>
This impressive chart is the combined work of Code for America (citizens working on technology problems with government), the Open Knowledge Foundation (promoting openness), and the Sunlight Foundation (promoting transparency). They identified 18 kinds of data that every US city is likely to collect.
They then assess whether each city publishes this data as open data, using 9 separate criteria: data exists; is digital; is publicly available; is free of charge; is online; is machine readable; is available in bulk; is openly licensed; and is up to date.
So an annual budget published once every year as a PDF would probably score 7 or 8 points, lacking machine readability and perhaps open licensing.
Global Census
Similarly, there is a Global Census, measuring open data availability for different countries. The Global Open Data Index Survey, ranks us 10th, somewhat improbably ahead of Germany:
(The choice of categories here is a bit odd. "Public transport timetables" don't always make a lot of sense at national level, being predominantly state or municipal in many cases. The requirement for a 1:250,000 scale "national map" is just plain weird in the era of OpenStreetMap)
Open Data City Census for Australia
As local governments around Australia begin their open data journey, the time has probably come for an “Australian city open data census”. It would both chart and guide their progress. The US list is a good starting point but some categories don’t apply well here:
Crime stats are probably collected at state level, not city.
City elections are less important here, so are campaign donations so important?
Public transport may be managed at a state rather than city level.
I had already started working on something similar with MAV, the Municipal Association of Victoria: a list of “High Priority Local Government Datasets" that most councils in Victoria could provide. The ultimate goal of that list is somewhat different however: joining up data from the geographically small councils into bigger, more useful datasets. And it focuses on “usefulness” rather than transparency.
Now, local versions of the Open Data Census have already been created for more than 25 different countries: the UK France even Burkina Faso and Bangladesh.
But there's still no Australian City Census. So, let's get on it.
Alex Sadleir, Open Knowledge Foundation Australia volunteer, has signed up to coordinate the effort. Get in touch if you can help out!
