Lots of people looking to learn about Open Data. Many see its potential for accountibility and transparency.

There's a potential conflict between open data and privacy that needs to be explored.

The sense that the public pay government to collect the data and that they therefore deserve to have unfettered access to data.

Chris of yeg city admin: tasked with reporting to council on open data by thend of the year: sees this wiki as an important part of that.

 The laws on the books today don't encourage openness. How do those laws need to change?

 Mack: Open data will create some transparency.

 What about smaller communities? How can they harness open data?

 Mack mentioned his blog: recent post has many relevant links

 Other Examples: garbage collection, "where are the spruce trees," crime stats, court records, everyblock.com is a good US example.

The format of the data is important. YEG city has 1100 systems and databases that they know about.

Open data would motivate the "cleaning up" of the data. Private citizens and co's can help.

5 things: Foundations for an Open Edmonton

Free

Permissive Lisencing

Open Standards: PDFs are terrible. e.g. CSV files

Variety of Data:

 Timely Access: How to inform citizens that the data is aviable and up-to-date

 The privacy question: we're talking about public data for public institutions.

 Netflix prize recomendations - anon data could be identified?

Can we effectively strip out personal identifiers in data?

Two world choices: 

1. Try to maintain privacy: smallgroup with sensitive info

2. Open up everything

Privacy: The problem is the ability to pin point/cross tabulate data/correlate among several databases e.g. Brown Mercedes car crash vs. motor vehicle records.

FOIP already can deliver tons of data. Not accessible/usable?

Mack embraces the concept of openness.

Dale: Why does government collect so much personal data?

There are controls and polcies in place to determine that.

 Dustin: copyright law is an important consideration. Education is incredibly expensive. Can open data change that?

What about an educational exemption?

 Access to academic information: should that be open?

 A distinction between instituional and information about the public data?

 Public  data? e.g. expense accounts for politicians.

 Kevin: There is tons of info.

Sue: The data maze is the issue. How to find it? Can't find it?