Some thoughts on sharing open government data and materials from Raleigh Public Record editor Charles Duncan Pardo: … I want to tell you why you open gov types need to think more like reporters.
So you’ve got all this data. Awesome data, fantastic data. People are making buckets full of money off this data, but what does it actually mean to the people on the ground? To the people paying their taxes to support projects like data.raleighnc.gov?
What do they know about shapefiles for neighborhood boundaries? Unless, of course, you got it wrong by 25 feet.
I’ve talked with the folks working for the city on this open data project and I have a lot of respect for them.
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The thing about public projects is they need to serve the people who are paying for it in a direct way. And most of those people are not you and they’re not me.