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If you're purely interested in holding government accountable for their actions, I can see why you might write this. A lot of the open data released has been th
by 46Bit 14y ago
If you're purely interested in holding government accountable for their actions, I can see why you might write this. A lot of the open data released has been things that will benefit entities other than political campaign groups.
Consider data on train positions in the UK. It's been locked up in various ways for a long time, or at least with restrictions that amount to non-commercial usage. So what you ask? Providing a live train-times service from the data costs money: I've been told it's upwards of 500 messages/second and there's a lot of problems you have to work around.
Releasing the data behind it is starting to help people to find cheaper tickets, make a more truthful record of train punctuality than official figures, etc. Many companies will benefit financially from this (rather than the current monopoly) but the public will benefit.
There are cases where accountability is at least starting to be possible. Last year I helped a newspaper look at published NHS data for things buried under the carpet - think hospitals that are failing to treat certain age groups for conditions like Diabetes. That's accountability. The UK pupil database is similarly promising.
Things need to get better but it's not as bad everywhere as the author claims of Canada or the USA.
- cube13 14y ago>Consider data on train positions in the UK. It's been locked up in various ways for a long time, or at least with restrictions that amount to non-commercial usage. So what you ask? Providing a live train-times service from the data costs money: I've been told it's upwards of 500 messages/second and there's a lot of problems you have to work around. >Releasing the data behind it is starting to help people to find cheaper tickets, make a more truthful record of train punctuality than official figures, etc. Many companies will benefit financially from this (rather than the current monopoly) but the public will benefit. That's the point of the entire post. If someone's making money off of the data, then they should pay for it. Taxpayers shouldn't be funding the release of the data just so companies can charge them to access it.
- wooster 14y agoThey already paid for it. The service is value added, which the taxpayer didn't pay for.
- greglindahl 14y agoSo we should inhibit a free train app because someone has a commercial train app? There's lots of data that's commercially valuable that's been given away for free for a long time, like unemployment and inflation numbers. Transparency creates extra value.