I've been following the topic of open data for quite a few years worldwide at the national level in Australia, Japan, Indonesia, UK, South Africa, Canada, US, and other countries. I've also followed the long running court battle which continues in California about open access to geospatial data at the county level.
At the municipal level Vancouver has been in the forefront of municipal open data - Vancouver's open data portal was initiated in September 2009. Jonathan Mark, senior manager of GIS and CADD services at the City of Vancouver, has just published a very worthwhile column about Vancouver's open data experience that provides valuable guidelines to any municipal government that is considering an open data policy.
- Make sure you're clear about the benefits your city expects in adopting an open data policy.
- Build a relationship with the local application developer community - these are the folks who will be developing applications using your data.
- Identify the constituencies who will use your data.
- Decide early on whether to host the data portal on internal servers or externally.
- Find data that can be released with minimal effort to get the ball rolling quickly and then augment the initial data sets over time.
- Develop processes for extracting data from native databases and transforming it into easily read formats for dissemination.
- Develop Terms of Use (TOU) in consultation with legal counsel (or use Vancouver's as other Canadian cities have). The TOU should protect the data provider, but not be restrictive on your users.
- Provide avenues for user feedback to maintain an open dialogue with the consumers of your data.
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