Government 2.0 in Ireland?

6th of September 2009 by conor

Way back in October 2007, I asked if it was time for api.gov.ie. We were unfortunately too busy building the tenements and ghettos of the future at that time to be concerned with such things. However in the U.S. some real momentum began around the idea of Government 2.0 and their CIO is really buying into it.

Tim O’Reilly, the Irishman who coined Web 2.0, has a superb piece in Techcrunch on this topic and has announced the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase and Gov 2.0 Summit.

Anyone in senior positions in Government, Civil Service or Public Sector interested in engaging with us on this in Ireland? All the skills are here. web2ireland.editor AT gmail DOT com if you have the ability to make something happen here.

Here are some simple examples of what has already been done without any public sector or semi-state support, imagine what we could do _with_ official support. Dammit, forget support, this should be a Government mandate.

If you have built anything which uses public sector data, via APIs, scraping or whatever, let us know and we’ll update this post.

UPDATE: Just look at this fabulous tool.

DataMasher is a map-based mash up site just took the Sunlight Foundation’s $10,000 grand prize in theApps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. This site offers an easy-to-use interface that allows regular citizens to combine and mix data sets without any programming knowledge. From here, data is displayed on a State-by-State basis in map format. Compare cancer hot spots to CO2 emissions, SAT scores to crime rates and even political contributions to State spending.

Could you imagine what we could do with that here? Starting with FAS budgets.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 9:03 am and is filed under Irish Web2.0 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “Government 2.0 in Ireland?”

nialllarkin

September 8th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

Have you seen this tool? For promoting comtributions and accountabilty at local level

visible government have put a django-based clone of fixmystreet on github

http://github.com/visiblegovernment/django-fixm…

web2ireland

September 9th, 2009 at 9:42 am

Thanks Niall. That looks like an excellent tool. It could work very well for local government.

topgold

September 20th, 2009 at 11:36 pm

One big problem with advocating govt APIs is trying to work out how to get developers inside county councils involved in this admirable cause. In fiscally trying times, several councils I know have little or no developer assets. Sometimes that's because developers on the payrolls are seconded to other jobs, covering maternity breaks or pressing manpower problems in other parts of the county council.

I wonder if Conor, Niall or Joe would be interested in attending a meet-up of county council developers, to explain this important idea. Those half-day events happen several times a year in different parts of Ireland.

web2ireland

September 21st, 2009 at 12:10 am

A good starting point might be the LGCSB. Happy to see they have a strong focus on OSS now, albeit 10 years later than they should. If they become the torch-bearers for Gov APIs, the rest should follow. Do they take part in these events?

CIO For Ireland @ Argolon

October 10th, 2009 at 2:32 pm

[...] see what is already happening and what we can learn from that’s happening in the USA, see my recent Web2Ireland post [...]

Kevin Cannon

March 4th, 2010 at 10:21 am

I’d love to get a version of fix my street up & running for Ireland. If anyone would like to start such an initiative give me a shout, I can handle the visual & UI design side, but would need to team up with some developers.

Brian O'Donovan

January 18th, 2011 at 9:46 am

This sounds like a great initiative. If you are setting up a “working group” I would love to get involved.

There is a site which searches all various public transport services in Dublin that you might like to link to http://hittheroad.ie/ (I have nothing to do with the creators of the site).