Sunlight’s Principels for Open Data Policies

Defining goals and evaluating open data policies in government can be tricky business.  As with everything else, transparency in government functions on a sliding scale.  There’s no basis for transparency and no way of gauging just how open an open data policy actually is.  The groundwork for these initiatives has largely been unlaid and in the end, we’re only hurting ourselves.  The theory at the core of open data policies is that information is the driving force behind innovation.  But how does one tell if their local open data policy is comprehensive or severely deficient?  And most importantly, what can be done to improve those policies? 

The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to catalyzing government openness and transparency, has developed a set of parameters to aid in evaluating open data plans in government.  Each criteria naturally has a range of transparency in and of itself, and the list is far from exhaustive but I must commend them for attempting to define openness in government. 

The ten parameters they’ve highlighted include completeness, primacy, timeliness, ease of physical and electronic access, machine readablity, non-discrimination, use of commonly owned standards, licensing, permanence and usage costs.  If implemented they are intended to “empower the public’s use of government-held data”.  Some of the criteria, such as releasing complete data sets from primary sources, seem ground in common sense.  Others, such as the use of commonly owned standards, is a point that many plans may have gleaned over in the past, but one that is critical for wide-spread adoption.  Data is often treated as an ever-evolving item, but creating permanence with regularly archived data sets and steady URLs and query mechanism is important in tracking changes over time and long term success of applications built on government data. 

Read more about all ten principles here: 

http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/ten-open-data-principles/