How does a country get to open data? What Taiwan can teach us about the evolution of access » Nieman Journalism Lab

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-04-12

Summary:

I recently had the pleasure of teaching a two-day data journalism workshop at the Commonwealth Magazine Group in Taiwan’s capital city. The signature moment came when I showed these journalists the L.A. Times crime map, and explained that it updated automatically from government data feeds. There were gasps from my audience. 'Why does the government publish all of that crime data, online, for free?' they asked.  I realized I didn’t have a quick answer to that. In the United States, in 2013, it’s widely assumed that governments on all levels should make their data available for public use. But why? How did we get here? And, importantly, how do other countries get there?  Since then I’ve been trying to understand the history of open data in the U.S. The underlying right to data access comes from the 1966 Freedom of Information Act ...  It is the combination of enlightened laws plus a long history of people claiming their rights under these laws that makes transparency seem so natural now. There are entire institutions devoted to the concept, such as the Sunlight Foundation ... It’s not that the journalists at Commonwealth Magazine don’t want the data. Indeed, the magazine — sometimes described as the Taiwanese equivalent of The Economist — is an Asian data journalism pioneer, winning awards for its infographics and now moving into interactives. Neither are they politically constrained in what they can cover or how they can cover it. Rather, the difficulty is access. 'We can write about anything, but there is this problem of getting correct information from the source,' Wu said.  Although the Freedom of Government Information law is not much used, there are other ways to get data in Taiwan, and a young open data community is advocating for access. T.H. Schee runs the IT consulting company Fertta.com and organizes many of Taiwan’s open data events. He has been keeping a spreadsheet of open data events since 2008, which now lists over 160 meetups, workshops, and hackathons.  The open data community is a diverse group of several hundred people, including technologists, activists, and domain experts from industry and government. Schee worked for the government himself from 2006 to 2009, at the Academia Sinicaresearch institute, and said that the government experience within the community is part of what makes it successful. 'And the program actually works,' he said, 'because the government launched several data portals and they are more willing to talk to us.'  There are now five cities in Taiwan with open data portals ... It’s not always the public sector that owns public data, especially in Taiwan.  According to Schee, there are only about 55 IT staff supporting the city of Taipei’s 30,000 public servants. Hence, most of the city’s IT functions are outsourced to private companies. These companies create and manage the majority of public data, and are often reluctant to release it online for free.  Tired of waiting, some people have published privately held government data without official permission ..."

Link:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/04/how-does-a-country-get-to-open-data-what-taiwan-can-teach-us-about-the-evolution-of-access/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.psi oa.comment oa.usa oa.legislation oa.south oa.events oa.presentations oa.taiwan oa.journalism oa.government oa.data oa.foi

Date tagged:

04/12/2013, 07:48

Date published:

04/12/2013, 03:48