Open government

All the hype about the NBN shouldn’t blind us to the fact that this Australian government doesn’t have an open government strategy and indeed has recently been shown up as running behind a number of countries including our country cousins across the Tasman.  This failing is one of the themes of this Blog, and I was reminded of this by a story in The Guardian about the US and the UK opening up government data:

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments are making more data available in more useful formats for developers. In Britain, the government aims to open access to postcode data by spring of next year.   This will most likely be the dataset that links postcodes to geographic location rather than the Postcode Address File (PAF) that links postcodes to addresses.  This is part of the Smarter Government project that Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced recently to get most government services and data online. The postcode data is just one of many datasets we can hope to see from the government, and with Sir Tim Berners-Lee involved, the formats will use open standards with input from the World Wide Web Consortium. The prime minister said that 1,100 datasets have already been released, and he said: “And there are many hundreds more that can be opened up - not only from central government but also from local councils, the NHS, police and education authorities”.  The government has also promised better access to data from local authorities.

Meanwhile here in Australia we still have councils like Lithgow harassing their business owners to give them information that’s already been provided to the ATO or the ABS, imposing unnecessary burdens.  Perhaps we need an National Government Information Initiative to match the NBN.  I’ve even got an acronym ready-made – NITWIT.