A brief history of open data

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Category: Blog

Created on Thursday, 12 June 2014 07:59

In December 2007, 30 open-data pioneers gathered in Sebastopol, Calif., and penned a set of eight open-government data principles that inaugurated a new era of democratic innovation and economic opportunity.

"The objective…was to find a simple way to express values that a bunch of us think are pretty common, and these are values about how the government could make its data available in a way that enables a wider range of people to help make the government function better," Harvard Law School Professor Larry Lessig said. "That means more transparency in what the government is doing and more opportunity for people to leverage government data to produce insights or other great business models."

The eight simple principles -- that data should be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, nondiscriminatory, nonproprietary and license-free -- still serve as the foundation for what has become a burgeoning open-data movement.

In the seven years since those principles were released, governments around the world have adopted open-data initiatives and launched platforms that empower researchers, journalists and entrepreneurs to mine this new raw material and its potential to uncover new discoveries and opportunities. Open data has drawn civic hacker enthusiasts around the world, fueling hackathons, challenges, apps contests, barcamps and "datapaloozas" focused on issues as varied as health, energy, finance, transportation and municipal innovation.

The full article can be found on FCW's website.