Toward better access and reuse of local government data

Local government open data is highly sought after by industry, researchers and the public to innovate and support their local communities.  But often there are barriers to making local government data accessible to the community - such as costs and training, finding the right IT platform, restrictive copyright issues, and establishing policies and procedures to make open data "business-as-usual".  A group of councils is hoping to address these issues by working together to pilot an open data solution tailored for local governments.  The pilot is a national initiative designed specifically for local government.  It is branded - localdata.net.au - and can be customised by councils. The pilot provides comprehensive support to participants for both pre and post publishing aspects of open data.  It is more than just a portal.  The councils on the pilot will be supported by the Open Technology Foundation (OTF), University of South Australia (UniSA), and the Australian Governments\u27 Open Access and Licensing Programme (AusGOAL).   AusGOAL will provide support for pre-publishing aspects such as open access training, establishment of organisational open data policies and procedures, and copyright and licensing guidance.  UniSA have implemented a CKAN software platform (localdata.net.au) to publish the data provided under the pilot.   CKAN is the world\u27s best open source, open data platform.   There is no cost to participate in the pilot - councils are asked to simply bring some interesting data and a commitment to participate in the pilot to make it a success.   PlanningAlerts.org.au is an example of data sharing at local level by the City of Salisbury. When setting up the City of Salisbury site under a Creative Commons license in 2010, adding a feed of City of Salisbury planning information to PlanningAlerts.org.au only required a simple bit of code added to the site which has required no intervention for two years. Now the data is in the mix with datasets from all over Australia. Adelaide City Council is opening up and sharing data with industry to foster community engagement with Unleashed, the Adelaide node of the national Govhack open data competition. Another social engagement initiative has combined Adelaide\u27s geographical based datasets with state government-held datasets to develop a  web-based application concept called Social Active which won the Premier\u27s Award and the national prize for "Best Benefit to the SA Community". Creative Commons licences are the preferred licences for opening access to publicly funded information.  Of the six Creative Commons licenses, the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) is the most popular, and provides the greatest opportunities for re-use of information and promotes a common standard of licensing.  An example is a recent request by the Bureau of Meteorology to all providers of water data to release the data to them under Creative Commons. So if your council has water data, and they have provided it to the BOM, then it is already open data under Creative Commons. These are just a few examples of the potential of open data.  You can read the case studies of Adelaide and Salisbury City Councils in more detail here.    Councils and universities from all states and territories are encouraged to participate in the localdata.net.au pilot.  Please contact office@localdata.net.au for further information.   Photo Credit: The JR James Archive, University of Sheffield via Compfight c