Open Data

One of our most popular pages is the Text List of All Countries in the World. Strangely this little piece of data has gotten over 60k hits since we posted it and has received a wide range of very positive reactions from around the world. What started as just something that annoyed me personally (how to get an updated list of all of the World's countries in on easy to copy/paste location) proved to be something that a lot of other people were looking for too.

Now, when I first did this I didn't expect that generating a list of countries was going to be quite so controversial. Apparently, lots of folks were concerned that my list didn't contain a country that they wanted to see. Now, I didn't have a lot of time to moderate this so just settled on Wikipedia's list of countries as the final value. This I think satisfied many people.

This data should be readily provided by the UN in a machine readable fashion. There is no reason why this data (and even lists of countries that are being considered) shouldn't be made available. Countries change their boundaries & names regularly enough that there are a great many data sources that regularly need to be updated. Why not make it easy?

This is a reprint of the post I wrote for GovFresh. It's mostly a re-write of the earlier blog post I wrote specifically for the Canadian government.

Most western governments have in the last decade developed an accessibility strategy for their websites, often based on WCAG 1.0. At the end of 2008, the WC3 announced the final version of WCAG 2.0 and the public sector is now struggling to keep up. In Canada there was a recent announcement about a revised Common Look and Feel (CLF). In the USA the Section 508 is in its first of six revisions, part of which will be to adapt to the new approach to standards. I’m not sure that most citizens will notice the changes to government websites, however for both people with disabilities and the tax payers, it will be a very big deal.

Very recently Canada's Treasury Board announced that the Common Look and Feel (CLF) for the Internet 2.0 Standard is being updated. Now, for those folks who don't spend a lot of time on Government of Canada websites it's not something that you are likely to notice. However for both people with disabilities & the Canadian tax payer at large it could be a very big deal. 

Improved Design

I want to first point out some of the good work done rethinking the CLF. Thomas Bradley's Proposal for CLF3.0 predated the public announcement for the update and presents a neat vision. More recently Cornelius Rachieru's post Thoughts on CLF 3.0 From Outside the Firewall produced a very neat vision of what is possible. Both of these visions will allow for much more visually interesting websites while maintaining an acceptable level of branding I feel.

I used to call the CLF the Common Ugly Look and Feel as CLF 1.0 was pretty terrible to look at. CLF 2.0 was a huge step in the right direction and there have been some very nice sites that still respect the standard but have a lot more flair to them.  With these two early concept pieces I'm sure that CLF 3.0 (if that is what it is called) will be even better looking. There are also some really great ideas floating around to help standardize best practices around use of emerging technologies.

Update (June 2): How could I have forgotten OpenID? I've advocated before for an OpenID server for the gc.ca, but would be great to have it integrated with GEDS. The next thing is that it's just silly that GEDS doesn't manage pagination. Try searching for 'Smith'. This isn't all that tricky to do!

For those of you who may not know the GEDS is the Government Electronic Directory Services. It's been a source of frustration for a while so I thought I'd outline some of the things that something like this could do and how it would help everyone who wants to contact people in their government.

This is a website that is trying to deliver an:

"important element of the information technology infrastructure necessary for the implementation of future government information and electronic commerce services."

So I decided to write down a list of things that would help them fulfill this mission.  It's just a few quick thoughts, but it would do so much more than the current site does.  Please feel free to add comments with more suggestions.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the accessibility of information that the government collects sometimes even distributes. We've blogged about problems getting information about postal code to riding data in the past. We ended up purchasing the data, but each time we do it is so inefficient it seems like it must cost the government more to sell it to me than give it away. Fortunately, there's been a lot of movement in this area around the world and there are a lot of good things to be inspired by.

In the USA today the Obama administration launched Data.gov which aims to "increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government." Now, government datasets seem pretty boring on the outset, but if you are trying to understand a problem it could be just the information you need. They are offering data in XML, CVS, Text, KML & map data. No restrictions (that I could see) on how I use the data. They've even got a rating system, and a call for other suggestions.  This is a great step forward.

Given the success of this simple list, I thought it would be good to see if it could be improved by opening it up to greater collaboration. Check out our blog post about Factual.

OpenConcept has been using open source software since it began in 1999, so I thought it was worth while looking at the differences between the GPL version 2.0 which has been the standard for copyleft software and what they are proposing in the latest draft of the GPL version 3.0 (3rd draft).