Open Government New York

Road Map for the Digital City: Achieving New York City's Digital Future is very well presented and an interesting read.
The tenets of Open Government in the doc are:

1. Open Government democratizes the exchange of information and public services, inviting all citizens to participate and engage.
2. Open Government connects citizens to one another, supporting more efficient collaborative production of services over the traditional mode of citizen consumption of government-produced services.
3. Open Government information is more valuable when it is collected at the source, and published in near-real-time.
4. Open Government data is machine-processable.
5. Open Government invites all information consumers- inside and outside government - to correct, improve, and augment data.
6. Open Government uses open standards, formats, APIs, licenses, and taxonomies.
7. Open Government is accountable and transparent, perpetually self-evaluating, iterating, and exploring new ways to solve old problems.
8. Open Government makes as much information as possible available to as many actors as possible and is designed to minimize financial and technological barriers to accessibility.
9. Open Government enables efficiency, cost savings, and the streamlining of government services.
10. Open Government is compatible, nimble, and mashable, fostering collaboration, coordination, and innovation with other governments, academic institutions, and organizations.

I like the "compatible, nimble and mashable" characterization. That sums it up really.

M is for "Map" as well as "Mobile"

Remember all the M- stuff? M-Government for example? I am seeing an interesting trend in eDemocracy-related data sets. People want to consume/contribute to the information corpus while mobile - that much is a given. iPads, Android phones etc...But a lot of eDemocracy-related information has a strong geo-component to it.

Thence M for Maps on top of M for Mobile. A powerful combination for eDemocracy. A real paradigm shift I think, away from the P for Paper and P for PDF that sadly, currently dominates.

So, I'm not surprised to see M-for-Maps (Government) becoming a buzz item in Asia where a lot of the M-for-Mobile (Government) emanted from. Inciting citizen engagement with Spatial Information

Version control for legislation

An interesting discussion on versioning law has started on Quora.

Webinar and slides available from Open Government Canada event

The webinar recording+slides of the Open Government Canada event are available here