I saw this video the other day (I think as a result of someone’s Tweet?) and just around to watching it now. The things people built using data that had been opened up from the government was pretty incredible.
Interestingly, I have a totally different website that operates by only using data that is already freely available from the government. If I had more data from the government, my site would be even more useful to my demographic.1
All of this, the video, my own website, got me thinking – if the data from the government can be released as “open data” – in what ways is our government already open source? We know the laws that supposedly govern us and our administrators… I suppose, open source is the ideal upon which our government was founded in the first place.
Video from Streetfilms covered by PlanetGreen/Discovery.com Tweeted by PlanetGreen RT’d by clothbot.
- There’s a MUCH longer story in there that’s not very interesting. [↩]