Will Obama promote openness?

The folks at Open Knowledge Foundation have outlined a list of things Barack Obama can do to promote openness which chime very nicely with the aidinfo objectives.

1.    Open government data.
2.    Open access to publicly funded research
3.    Publish public information in way which makes it easy to re-use.
4.    Legal and licensing clarity
5.    Make it open by default

(see their blog posting for more details)

Interesting to also to note that opening up Government data in accessible formats is currently in 5th place on the Obama CTO site, which invites ideas and votes for the top priorities of the first US national CTO,  with over nearly 6000 votes. So get voting – let’s move it into top three!

The pitch for the idea states:

“We can unleash a wave of civic innovation if we open up government data to programmers. The government has a treasure trove of information: legislation, budgets, voter files, campaign finance data, census data, etc. Let's STANDARDIZE, STRUCTURE, and OPEN up this data.”

Quite. This is exactly what we want to do with aid data!

and with Obama championing transparency in Government in his inauguration speech , there is room for optimism