Finnish open government data – guide book

We (Antti Poikola, Petri Kola ja Kari A. Hintikka) are currently writing a guide book about open government data for the Finnish Ministry of Transportation and Communications. (See Google translated announcement from the site of the Ministry)

Since the beginning it has been clear for us, that we ought to “eat our own dog food” and be as open as possible with the process. Still it is not so easy to come out from the closet with something, that is not ready yet! Finally, now in the half way of the process (the book should come out in early March) we got the courage to start publishing draft versions of our texts and gather feedback openly. For those of you who read Finnish, you may follow and comment http://dataopas.posterous.com/ (about one blog-post per day). The guidebook itself will be published with Creative Commons – name licence.

It would be great to get also international “open data people” to comment on certain topics of the book, but we are not yet sure if we get extra funding, so that we could translate the guidebook into english. During the process I have found few times the W3C eGovernment Interest Group mailing list very helpful (See my corresponcendence about the “Big picture” of open data and the “Raw data now” approach).

The poster from Ton Zijlstra and James Burke, below summarizes pretty much the practical part of opening the data (HOW), that we want to tell in our guide book. Beside practicalities we need to argument the case (WHY) of opening the data, but that is a bit longer story…

Open Gov Data Poster Flow Chart

Open Gov Data Poster Flow Chart