Open Government Data Initiative
For those interested in the subject of open government, innovation and how technology can support better public services through transparency, collaboration and open participation over the web you've probably already looked at https://innovate.direct.gov.uk/apps and the work that groups like mysociety and rewiredstate.org are doing to marry public data sets and Web 2.0 into something useful to both citizens, government and business. You might even be inspired by the work happening in the US around the Open Government Initiative on Data.Gov and the apps for America consultations that have been happening. Clearly something very exciting is happening when government starts to put their non-sensitive public domain information out there in a consumable format on the web and people start to think of ways to put that information to serious work. This encourages the innovators both inside the public sector, in industry and among our citizens to build solutions at relatively low risk to government, with potentially high impact and usefulness. The "crowd-sourcing" approach applies to development of these solutions but also to the purpose of many such applications. Interactive sites have the merit of rapid feedback, dialog, reflection and conversation which can inform public policy and also encourage higher standards in public services and better targeting of resources. If you're unsure of the ways in which this might be useful have a look at all the ideas mysociety.org have already come up with, things like fixmystreet and the parliamentary scrutiny site theyworkforyou. Take a look at some of simple but powerful utilities on rewiredstate.org, some of the existing projects on innovate.direct.gov.uk or consider the NHS crowdsourcing site iwantgreatcare.org. The potential has only just begun to be explored.
The good news is that Microsoft's Public Sector Developer Evangelism team have been at the forefront of these developments, driving our Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) and building tools and APIs based on the Azure Services Platform in order to make innovating around government data simple and accessible. OGDI makes it easier to both publish and use a wide variety of public data from government agencies without having to host anything yourself. We're also reducing the "hack" factor in building government data mashups by providing slick web service interfaces to data. OGDI-based web API’s can therefore be accessed from a variety of client technologies such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc. so it doesn't matter if your developers Microsoft developer technologies or not, they can still make use of this API to publish data and bring their application ideas to life.
To read all about this on our website, please visit the site:
https://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/opengovdata/default.aspx
and to have a play with a sample data browser and application sample (mapping of crime incidents), here:
https://ogdisdk.cloudapp.net/DataBrowser.aspx?Container=dc&EntitySet=CrimeIncidents
Posted by Phil