Notes to readers of the Open Data, Open Society report

These are some introduction notes to readers of the report about openness of public data in EU local administrations. The full report is released under a Creative Commons cc-by license and can be freely downloaded from the web site of the DIME project or from Sant’Anna school.

As explained in the introduction I have integrally republished this report (written in October 2010) about openness of public data in EU local administrations in separate pages here at Stop!/Zona-M for two reasons. The most important is to encourage feedback and public discussion, on each separate issue in the most efficient way. I also wanted to give to more visibility to a few sections that are (I hope) useful and complete even without the rest of the report. In order to achieve these two goals, I have (had to) split the report in pages that would be:

• devoted to only one (sub) topic
• not longer than 900/1000 words

The unavoidable consequence is that a few of the pages that resulted from this splitting are very short, apparently pointless ones, that make sense only in the context of the full report. I think this is not a problem, because those paragraphs still have a place in the full work, and on the whole the split makes it much easier to read and comment only the parts you’re really interested in.

Final note on the style of the report

This report is far from complete. It would be very, very hard to give exhaustive coverage of such a large and rapidly evolving subject, by working alone for a short period as it was the case here.

This said, the style and slant of this report have a well defined reason. I have deliberately tried to write something correct and useful, but also simple. Something, that is, that could be immediately understandable by, and relevant for, all citizens. As I have tried to explain in the report, Open Data are wonderful, but can deliver all their promises only if many citizens demand and actually, regularly use them. I hope this report can be a little step towards that goal.

M. Fioretti – January 2011
(please report all errors and/or broken links in the report in the comments to each page or, even better, by email at mfioretti, at: nexaima; dot net)