On Fri, 22 May 2009 15:13:11 -0500 Brian Denzer <[email protected]> wrote: > By the way, this is going to have enormous implications for local > governments. The precedent is now established for open data policies > everywhere. Whether those policies offer truly meaningful > tranparency, or just a veneer, will be up to us to discern.
This may not be word-for-word, but it's pretty close: "We are only one well-crafted sunshine law request from total meltdown". In Petaluma, California, at least, the IT department has no particular budget to get ahead of this curve, so there's no systemic funding to get data out, but there are a number of individuals who understand that their jobs long-term are going to be much much easier if they get the data out there first, rather than having to retrieve and correlate it after the fact based on a sunshine law request. One of the mashups I did was grabbing recent building permits out of the online database and dropping them on Google maps via GeoRSS. Doesn't seem too interesting to see that you're neighbor's getting their water heater replaced, but this got some neurons firing, and they're now seeing if they can get the planning and permitting process online so that we can do mashups to make sure that the new developments aren't bombshells dropped off-handedly in city council meetings. Dan _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
