Inside PBS Blog

It may look like an obscure obscene gesture, but the "open government" gang sign is only one of the interesting developments from a recent summit of open government data advocates.

The group of thirty, convened in December by Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, created a Google group and a list of eight open data principles for government data. Among them: That data be complete, timely, and "machine processable."

The new year brings some news on the open data front.

David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, blogged Tuesday on the IdeaLab Web site about President Bush signing the "OPEN Government Law of 2007" into law on December 31st. The legislation expands some public access to request government data.

The OPEN Government Law "substantially reforms the Freedom of Information Act and expands the definition of who is a 'representative of the news media' under FOIA," Ardia writes. "This change would significantly benefit bloggers and non-traditional journalists by making them eligible for reduced processing and duplication fees that are available to 'representatives of the news media.'"