Open Data Roadmaps: listening to people’s needs
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In order to succeed in our aim of making data serve democracy, we must alter much of the existing thinking we have described in this section. Instead of seeing data as a government asset over which it wields unilateral control, we must begin to consider it a duty of government to release open data for citizen benefit. It should be part of our civic contract [49].
Government data was created for the people and it belongs to the people. People should be able to access and reuse this data to create new businesses and economic value, to do good in their community, or to hold their elected representatives to account. People should have confidence in the quality, reliability and sustainability of the data being released [50].
While necessary exceptions and restrictions will always exist, there should be a starting presumption that public sector data belongs to the people.
[49] As noted above there are pockets of success that do appear to operate in this fashion, for example Leeds Data Mill http://www.leedsdatamill.org/about/
[50] The Open Data Institute worked with the open data community to create Open Data Certificates, https://certificates.theodi.org, to support this approach. Unfortunately the data.gov.uk site continues to use an outdated model.
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