Some of you may remember that Alexis Madrigal of Wired was soliciting for input regarding open government data - for a piece he was working on.
There's now a page on Wired's wiki - which he's encouraging people to add to. http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Open_Up_Government_Data Also - in case people hadn't seen - Vivek Kundra is to be the new Federal Chief Information Officer: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030501060.html J. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Hello Everyone, You may remember my name from an email I sent to the group a couple months ago looking for areas where government-produced data could be made more available or usable. I've received several queries about the state of the article — and now I can finally give you some good news. Ahead of the official launch on Sunday, I just wanted to thank this group, who informed much of this work, and invite you to participate in the experiment. If it works, I think it could really be a great model for what people kind of annoying call service-journalism. The story is going out on the Wired home page at midnight eastern on Sunday night under the headline, "Data.gov Is Coming — Let's Help Build It". But I should warn you. It's not a traditional news story. It's a wiki, which actually, is already live: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Open_Up_Government_Data. I'll explain in greater depth later, but the idea is to combine the crowd's dataset trouble spotting with Wired's voice/platform and my elbow grease to get important and valuable datasets made available and usable. Vivek Kundra seems like an ally — as do his superiors — but we want to hold them to their claims about wanting to open up government data. Here's a little explanation of how we got from the original email to this point. First, you are all brave people for fighting the good fight on behalf of all of us. Peering into the dark caverns of government data nearly broke my spirit (and oddly gave me a newfound fear of spiders, or at least poisonous things). After a hundred hours spent researching, revising, and rewriting, we realized that what I was doing wasn't working. The actual mode of journalism with its traditional endgoal of a "finished product" article that tells people how it is wasn't up to the task. The idea had always been that this was collaborative action, so why the hell was I trying to create a piece of content in static form? So, we pivoted, sliced up pieces of reporting and writing from the 2,000 word feature and tossed away its carcass. It hurt. But it hurt so good. Now, we're just hoping that we can get some momentum behind this project and start to help build Data.gov. You all could go a long way towards establishing that moment and what you have in your brains is incredibly valuable. I hope you can devote a few minutes to sharing it with us. (And of course linking any and all complementary efforts that are already underway.) Thank you, and as always, feel free to get in touch via any medium. (Particularly if you have any trouble with the mediawiki markup language or find a fresh, new bug on the site.) Best, Alexis Madrigal W: 415.276.8481 M: 415.602.4953 Staff Writer, Science and Energy Wired.com Magazine Publishers of America, Website of the Year — News Wired Science: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/ Magazine Publishers of America, Best Magazine Blog Finalist Twitter: @alexismadrigal Shorty Awards Finalist for Best in #Green Book Research: http://www.greentechhistory.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open Government" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open-government?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- -- Jonathan Gray Community Coordinator The Open Knowledge Foundation http://www.okfn.org _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
