Si! Handmade, nel senso che  a partire dall’iniziativa libera, a-partitica, quattro amici al bar, decidono di mettere sù un sito a dispetto della mancanza di una strategia politica sull’Open Data in Canada.

Forse non erano proprio al bar, forse non sono quattro.. anzi, eppure ecco cosa è stato lanciato oggi: datadotgc.ca

Unlike the United States (data.gov) and Britain (data.gov.uk), Canada has no open data strategy. This must change. Canadians paid for the information gathered about our country, ourselves and our government. Free access to it could help stimulate our economy and enhance our democracy. In pursuit of this goal, this website is a citizen-led effort to promote open data and help share data that has already been liberated.
Hi. I’m David. Welcome to one of my hobbies, a voluntary site I’m collaboratively creating with a small group of friends and, I hope, a growing community that you may want to join. We built this site because, as citizens, we want our governments to open up and share their data, in useful, structured formats that people can actually use or analyze. Unlike our American and British peers, the Canadian Federal (and provincial…) government(s) currently have no official, coordinated effort to release government data. We think that should change.
But rather than complain, we thought we’d do something. This is our effort. A stab at showing our government, and Canada, what a federal open data portal could and should look like.

Our Goals

• Be an innovative platform that can demonstrate to government how they should share data.
• Show citizens and politicians which Federal Ministries are striving to share data and be transparent, and which are not.
• Bring together government data in one place to both make it easier to find.

Future Plans
In addition to the functionality you already see on this site we hope, in the near future, to be able to:

• Respond to other requests to make this site better from the developer community
• Point to applications and mashups that use open government data
• Host data sets (where licenses permit) and offer APIs

Who are some of the people behind this site?The development team includes a number of people including the people at Raised Eyebrow Web Studio, Luke Closs, and a number of fantastic coders from the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are also some great people over at the Datadotgc.ca Google Group who have helped scrape data, tested for bugs and been supportive in lots of nice ways.

This site is powered by Drupal and CKAN (the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, which is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation)

E visto che gli amici son sempre pochi, ecco come si può allargare la cricca di sostenitori e attori che volontariamente possono contribuire a liberare i dati:

Some of the many ways you can help:

• Liberate a dataset! If you know of open government data that isn’t listed here, please add it to the site!
• Add information to existing data packages: Many of the packages we have are missing key information, such as the name of the ministry that released the data, the date the package was last updated, and so on. And many others could benefit from being tagged in more useful ways. One of the most helpful things you can do is to help us tag and catalogue our data packages in more helpful ways so that people can find and use them more easily. (To add information, just navigate to any data package and follow the “Update this info” link.)
• Translation! We believe that datadotgc.ca should be available both official languages. Translation services are, however, very expensive. If you are interested in helping us make datadotgc.ca available in French we would be very, very keen, to chat with you!
• Join the DATAdotGC.ca Google Group. That’ll get you in the loop as to what’s already planned and/or underway, and introduce you to the other great folks involved in the project.
• If you’re interested in CKAN (particularly if you’re from outside of Canada and are considering doing an open government portal for your country),check out the ckan-discuss list.
• Build an app that uses government data. This is a great way to encourage government to share data, because it helps them understand the benefits.
• Share this project with your networks: Blog, tweet, post the link on Facebook, email your friends… Any way you can help us get the word out about this project is really helpful.

Liberare i dati in Italia è come gridare “Rivoluzione“!