Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Open Data would be nice

All the written work done by local councils has been on computers for many years now.   More or less all the councils have been online for a decade or more now.   The cost of storing a document online is more or less nothing.   Given all these things, can anyone explain to me why the City of Victoria has so little past information online?

The City of Victoria website seems to contain a lot of information, but it is very effectively hidden by not organizing it well and then not have a good search tool.   I honestly do not know what is available to to be found.   I would like to know how the city is doing financially, but there is very limited good data I can find.

We should be able to see the budgets and audited statements of the city for at least the last decade.  It is not as if the documents do not exist in electronic formats.  It is hard to understand the long term financial trends in the city if you do not get access to the data.

We are in the information age and it is easier than ever for us to find the raw data needed to understand what is going on.  Frankly, the more raw data the City provides, the less they need to rely on staff to write up public reports.   You also have the advantage of a lot more people finding the mistakes and giving well thought out solutions.

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