[plug] August Talk - Western Australian Government Open Data

[Onno Benschop]

I think that there may be some misunderstanding here.

Government Open Data is about publishing data that exists within the
government. It's not about your private information at all.

For example:

   - the amount of houses built in a particular suburb by the department of
   housing
   - the number of road fatalities and their causes
   - the speed limits of roads
   - the locations of traffic lights
   - the train and bus time-tables
   - the list of documents available at the state reference library
   - the budget line items
   - a database with all the expense records of all the politicians in the
   parliament


I'm making these up - though some exist - but they are examples of what
Government Open Data is about.

The front-end to this for WA will be http://data.wa.gov.au

Note that the federal version of this has been running for some time at
http://data.gov.au under the admirable direction of Pia Waugh - a staunch
open source advocate, (winner of the Rusty Wrench for Service to the Open
Source community, past (vice) president of Linux Australia), and that
several state versions have also been available for some time. WA has been
a little later in this process, but personally I agree with the State CIO
who outlined that other states just published data for publishing sake,
rather than look at what is useful, machine readable and repeatable as a
publishing method. WA has had lots of location based data available for a
long time via SLIP, the Shared Location Information Platform which is run
by Landgate.

Why do I know this?

Because I'm a participant in GovHack, an annual event where geeks get
together to write software that uses such public data. This year we wrote a
visualisation tool for data-sets and last year we visualised the usage
patterns of the public transport system in Perth.

Hope this clarifies things.


On 17 August 2015 at 18:15, Linda Ray <lindarayonline at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello pluggers, I am not to sure about all until the corrupt elite are
> brought down, it is subject to a great deal of abuse of our
> data/information.
>
> After all the whole point of using linux and also Retroshare is to have
> privacy. We know of folks who have lost all their computers and data by
> those in charge.
>
> mmm I may listen if I can get in otherwise I will probably not be too
> keen at this stage of what is going on, re this planet.
>
> Kind Regards,
> Linda
>
> On 03/08/15 08:38, Michael Van Delft wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > This month’s PLUG talk we have a great topic lined up, we will have
> > Damian Shepherd talking about the new Open Data policy. The policy was
> > announced at GovHack and it’s a Western Australian Whole of Government
> > Policy. Open Data within government is a hot topic and it’s great to
> > see a clear direction from within State Government around releasing
> > data in free and accessible formats. Damian works at Landgate and has
> > been heavily involved with the policy. For more information on the
> > policy check out http://data.wa.gov.au
> >
> > As usual we are meeting on the second Tuesday of the month (Tuesday
> > the 11th of August) at Spacecubed, 45 St Georges Terrace, Perth WA
> > 6000 arrive at 18:30 for a 19:00 start.
> >
> > --
> > Michael
> > _______________________________________________
> > PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> > http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> > Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au
> > PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership
>
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au
> PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership
>



-- 
Onno Benschop

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