This short film by the Open Knowledge Foundation deals with the raise of open government data and can be found on the Open Government Data website. Open data is changing the relationship between citizens and their government. People are now more aware of government’s spending, who is representing them, and the companies that do business with the government. Some say that open data is bringing a global social change, that it is modifying the way society works.Watch this film and tell us what you think…
Every journalist needs to know about data. It is not just the preserve of the investigative journalist but can – and should – be used by reporters writing for local papers, magazines, the consumer and trade press and for online publications.
Think about crime statistics, government spending, bin collections, hospital infections and missing kittens and tell me data journalism is not relevant to your title.
If you think you need to be a hacker as well as a hack then you are wrong. Although data journalism combines journalism, research, statistics and programming, you may dabble but you don’t need to know much maths or code to get started. It can be as simple as copying and pasting data from an Excel spreadsheet. [Read more…]
Picture: "Where does my money go?" by the Open Knowledge Foundation
The open data movement, with the US and UK governments to the fore, is putting a vast and unprecedented quantity of republishable public data on the web. This information tsunami requires organisation, interpretation and elaboration by the media if anything eye-catching is to be made of it.
Experts gathered at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia last week to discuss what journalistic skills are required for data journalism.
Jonathan Gray, community coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation, spoke on an open data panel about the usability of data. “The key term in open data is ‘re-use’,” he told Joel Gunter from Journalism.co.uk.
Government data has been available online for years but locked up under an all rights reserved licence or a confusing mixture of different terms and conditions.
The Open Knowledge Foundation finds beneficial ways to apply that data in projects such as Where Does My Money Go which analyses data about UK public spending. “It is about giving people literacy with public information,” Gray said.
The key is allowing a lot more people to understand complex information quickly.
Along with its visualisation and analysis projects, the Open Knowledge Foundation has established opendefinition.org, which provides criteria for openness in relation to data, content and software services, and opendatasearch.org, which is aggregating open data sets from around the world.
“Tools so good that they are invisible. This is what the open data movement needs”, Gray said.
Some of the Google tools that millions use everyday are simple, effective open tools that we turn to without thinking, that are “so good we don’t even know that they are there”, he added.
Countries such as Itlay and France are very enthusiastic about the future of open data. Georgia has launched its own open data portal, opendata.ge.
The US with data.gov, spend £34 million a year maintaining that various open data sites. Others are cheap by comparison, with the UK’s data.gov.uk reportedly costing £250,000 to set up.
