Following the soft-launch of OpenOttawa.org last week (full launch to follow with more volunteers onboard and FixIt Ottawa), I’ve posted on the Mayor’s Taskforce on eGovernment report site regarding open access to public data. Locking away data that is created with public monies behind individual access requests, dissemination fees is no way to encourage a local culture of innovation and experimentation.

You can read up on it at http://ottawa.taskforcereport.ca/blogs/threefunda/openaccess/.

What are your thoughts? I realize the importance of assigning a nominal fee to disseminate data so that city staff aren’t wasting their time fulfilling superfluous requests, but publishing some basic sets of data that can be used for publicly accessible tools and mashups would go a long way in  jumpstarting innovation around community tools and services. The potential value derived from the resulting tools would supercede the negigible costs associated with providing the data to begin with.  I’m getting too far ahead of myself, but perhaps even a documented CityAPI?