Encourage crowdsourcing around Public Sector Information

The problem

Preparing PSI for sharing can be time consuming, expensive and, sometimes difficult. Engaging the community in the task by encouraging crowdsourcing will help enthuse potential users while increasing the quality and quantity of available data when working within a constrained budget. A variety of practical and innovative platforms, such as GitHub, are at your disposal to harness the skill and enthusiasm of the community at large.

The solution

Open Knowledge Network Working Groups: The active working groups coordinated by Open Knowledge International could be a starting point for governments to outreach to those interested in data on a specific topic or sector. These topic-specific community groups coordinate advocacy and projects around the data they are interested in opening. Some active working groups include: lobbying data, OpenGLAM and Open Education. They may have knowledge in the data to add new datasets or identify where other relevant datasets may exist.

Link to the existing data projects and conform to existing data standards: Initiatives like the Open Transport gather a repository of transport datasets. Governments releasing data could work to link data standards to these existing repositories and provide links to these projects as they are an example of crowdsourced data.

Criminal Justice Data Inventory, Sunlight Foundation: This inventory of criminal justice datasets was manually collected and published by the Sunlight Foundation. Once the platform was released, police departments from across U.S. submitted datasets for inclusion in the platform, demonstrating the value and desire for feedback mechanisms within governments as well as for the public.

CKAN Platform: CKAN, an open source data portal platform developed by Open Knowledge Labs, includes features that allows users to engage and comment on the data, with the ultimate aim of increasing data quality and giving users an option to add datasets.