This weekend an Open Government Working Group conference was held in Sebastopol, CA. It was very useful and productive. I didn’t think that I contributed as much as I should have, personally, but in any case… Sunlight’s Micah Sifry has a good write-up, so I won’t repeat all of those details. (It was great to (finally) meet a number of people- Greg (Palmer), Donny, Larry, Carl, Tom…)
Important links:
A new website www.opengovdata.org came out of it, which has nice announcement text
as well as a wiki wiki.opengovdata.org (which I’m hosting, so blame me for problems) for ongoing discussion on neutral turf.
There’s a Flickr tag with a bunch of photos. You can see that Tim O’Reilly’s big colored sticky note cards played an important role in many sessions.
One of the tangible results of the conference was a set of eight principles for how to determine whether some government data is “open”. It’s similar to how we use criteria elsewhere to determine whether software is open, and also the Open Knowledge Definition. And it was suggested that we develop some sort of branding that we all can make use of to support and point to the principles. The discussion pages linked from some of the terms in the principles are editable wiki pages and do need to be fleshed out with suggestions from anyone.
Also, Dan Newman started some discussion about how to mobilize citizens at large over transparency issues. I am eager to see how that discussion continues— I expect some organizing will happen on the (open) mail list created at the conference (and linked from www.opengovdata.org; yes, yet another mail list…).