Joint statement: Finally setting the standard to “open”! - not your GovData.de

Use the link to access and sign the declaration introduced as follows: "On August 8th, 2012, the german Federal Ministry of the Interior announced its intention to build an open government data portal to make national information and data freely available for use by citizens. Up until now, a lot of the relevant datasets have still not been made available or at least are not released under an open license. The German open data and open government community (here undersigned) put together a (sample-)list of relevant datasets that we are requesting to be released in accordance with the Open Definition. As it stands right now, the community fears a watering down of the open government idea may be the only effect of the platform. In an open letter, representatives of the german Open Data community outline why the federal data platform (govdata.de) is not acceptable in its currently planned form. The reasons for our current criticism are as follows: The chosen license model for the portal is a custom solution that does not conform to internationally recognized standards, The portal, as seen so far, is lacking provisions for usability and security, Furthermore, there are no visible efforts to motivate users to reuse the data provided. The custom licence model cuts Germany off from the open data pool Major problems with applying a custom license to the data in question is that unfamiliarity with a new license discourages reuse, as developers and users must seek additional advice before risking to work with the data. Moreover, the most interesting and useful applications developed with open data often require data from numerous sources to be combined – this is why interoperability (such as is possible between some of the approved open licenses listed above) is so important. What needs to happen? The success of the platform and the entire open government data strategy of Germany depends on the publication of government data that is truly open. The current approach risks devaluing the concept of open government. This is why we are making the following requests from www.govdata.de ..."