Germany Releases Open Data Action Plan Amidst Grassroots Enthusiasm and Pirate Party Turmoil | TechPresident

"The German government on Wednesday unveiled its open data action plan to implement the open data charter established by the G8, now G7, countries. But while German open government advocates welcomed its release, for them it does not go far enough. Even as the open data movement is taking new hold in Germany on the local level with encouragement from the new Code for Germany effort, in the national Pirate Party, the supposed German net party, internal leadership disputes are overshadowing its digital agenda ... Open data movement gets a boost in Germany ...  The charter, released in June 2013, calls for government data to be open by default in consideration of privacy restrictions, places an emphasis on both open data quantity and quality, calls for the data to be available in as many formats as possible and urges governments to release data with the goal of encouraging more responsible governing and innovation. In Wednesday's document, the German government says it aims to implement the commitments it outlines in 2015 to start off a process that will continue in the years beyond that. One of the commitments is to introduce legislation that would legally codify the publication of administrative data with unified metadata descriptions, in machine readable formats and using open licenses as a basic principle. In addition, the government says it will conduct a study to evaluate the possible revenue and expenditures involved with selling data, that it will call on all administrative departments to name open data coordinators and create guidelines for incorporating open data considerations during the IT procurement and development process. The government says it will work to continue to make core datasets it has already identified accessible through the German open data portal by the end of 2015, many of which are only in PDF form. The German Open Data portal, which is in beta format, currently says it has around 12,000 data sets, documents and applications from the federal government, states and municipalities. Some of the federal datasets the government plans to make available on the portal over the next year include some budgetary calculations, police crime statistics and data on agricultural organizations. Data that is already available in machine-readable format on the portal includes main federal budget data for recent years, detailed national election result data since 2013 and German laws. By the end of the first quarter of 2015, the government says it aims to have published at least two datasets from each supreme, higher and intermediate federal authority ..."