Getting on with Government 2.0 - Department of Finance and ...

Open standards
Peer production
Public Sector Information
An open standard is one which is collaboratively developed, clearly defined and
recognised by an independent body. Open standards are vendor neutral and
encourage interoperability by not being confined to any one platform.
Peer production relies on self-organising communities of individuals who come
together to produce a shared outcome. In these communities the efforts of a large
number of people are coordinated to create meaningful projects. Common examples
are Wikipedia and Linux, a computer operating system.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines public sector
information as ‘information, including information products and services, generated,
created, collected, processed, preserved, maintained, disseminated, or funded by or
for the government or public institution’. 352
RDF (Resource Description The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from
Framework)
library catalogues and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of
news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events
using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight
ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web. 353
Remix/reuse
RSS
Semantic web
Social media
Social networking
In an online context refers to the process of users taking data and modifying it to
create something new. It generally requires that the original content be released
under a sufficiently permissive form of copyright licence, such as Creative Commons.
A family of web feed formats, the most well-known being Really Simple Syndication,
which provide a method for collecting, publishing and editing web resources from
periodically updated web sites. 354 Many online services, applications, modern web
browsers and mail clients are capable of receiving RSS feeds which receive new
content when the original website is updated.
The semantic web is ‘a web of data’. It is about common formats for integration
and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, whereas the original Web
mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language
for recording how the data relates to real world objects. This allows a person, or a
machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of
databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing. 355
Online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights,
experiences, and perspectives. 356 Social media can take many different forms,
including internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video,
rating and bookmarking. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, email, instant
messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, to name a few.
Engaging in a social network service, i.e. a service which builds online communities
of people who share interests and/or activities. Facebook and Twitter are examples of
social network services which are widely used worldwide.
352 Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Council, April 2008,
Recommendation of the OECD Council for enhanced access and more effective use of public sector
information, http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/0/27/40826024.pdf, p. 4.
353 http://www.w3.org/RDF/.
354 http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/Glossary#R.
355 http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ and http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.
356 http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/Glossary#S.
104
Engage: <strong>Getting</strong> on with Government 2.0 | report of the government 2.0 taskforce