While my vision about opening up development data has been limited to rants, the much more practical folks at the International Aid Transparency Initiative have come up with a set of hands-on recommendations to make aid information 1) legally open (e.g. Creative Commons Attribution), 2) technologically open (going beyond APIs) and 3) easy to find (common metadata is not the only solution). The report, Unlocking the potential of aid information, is a vade mecum that takes the aid community a step closer to a common aid information standard (hat tip: Michel Bauwens). It also includes some recommendations for the World Bank! It is open for consultation until November 1st.
And since we are on the topic of consultations, European citizens (though not only) might be interested in contributing their comments to the draft Open Declaration on Public Services in the EU:
We want the whole spectrum of government information from draft legislation to budget data to be easy for citizens to access, understand, reuse, and remix.
Amen to that. A good companion to the declaration is a practical example of how openness might work, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security (of all places!). What I liked in the latter is the emphasis on resilience: is an open public service and/or development sector likely to be more resilient?
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