eGov AU: Government agencies need to think open first with all content - example of the Clean Energy Regulator

"Last week the Clean Energy Regulator released a calendar that illustrates when other government agencies use National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting data. Called the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting publication calendar, this is useful data for locating government reports on energy and climate change. It also serves a secondary role in highlighting the importance of the information collected and released by the regulator. Now a calendar, by its nature, is simply a table of data - so it would make sense to release this calendar as data. Indeed as it is a public document, with no security or private constraints, it is a perfect candidate to be released as open data. This would allow the calendar to be mashed up with other data on the topic to present, perhaps, a comprehensive calendar of climate change and energy research in Australia. Indeed it would likely be simpler to release this calendar as data than as a formatted document, which would require additional formatting and conversion steps. This could also meet all government accessibility requirements, as well as making the data easily reusable by others. So what did the Clean Energy Regulator do? They released the calendar only as a DOC and a PDF. *deep sigh* It's clear to me that there's still a major disconnect in government regarding when and how to release data in an open way. This is likely an education gap, but also a KPI gap. If public servants were required in their KPIs to ensure that relevant public content they were responsible for was published in an open and machine-readable fashion we might see some change ..."