Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
of budget expenses; aggregate data on budget and create forms of measuring the
successes; open a portal for public requests of information on the FOIA 10 ; distribute
the data, ensuring their redundancy; open the meetings and the political schedules;
open the governmental research; collect the information from the public with
transparency; allow the public to speak directly to the president; and make available
indexable data, which can be structured by crawlers and accessible.
In Brazil, the issue of open governmental data has been approached by the regional
office of the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C — an international
consortium with a concern in developing collaborative universal standards for the
web. The W3C assumed, in Brazil, a position of articulation of the public powers
around the open governmental data, orienting them with regards to the forms of
availability.
One of the publications of W3C-Brasil and of the Comitê Gestor da Internet
no Brasil [Internet Management Committee in Brazil] (CGI.br) was the document
Melhorando o Acesso ao Governo com o Melhor Uso da Web, of 2009 [Improving Access
to the Best Use of the Web]. In approximately 90 pages, the document records
that the large production of data by the public organizations has been published in
different formats since prior to the digitalization of the communicational processes,
reaching in this same manner the current times. In opposition to this context, the
open governmental data “refer to the publication of information of the public sector
in a gross open format, so as to make them accessible to all and enable its utilization,
such as the creation of data mashups (being a mashup the mixture of data of two or
more different applications or data sources, producing comparative points of view
of the combined information) 11 ”.
Open governmental data, therefore, enable the use of public information by the
citizens. Transparency in the networked public sphere is related to the understanding
of the forms of availability of such data by the governments, and the greatest responsibility
relative to the information formats, representing a change in comparison to
what has been done up to now. It is necessary to comprehend that transparency, in
this new communicational context, will not be ensured by the mere publication of
data and information in the network, but through a clear strategy of informational
10. Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. Available at http://www.justice.gov/oip/index.html. Accessed
in Feb/2010.
11. Available at http://www.w3c.br/divulgacao/pdf/gov-web.pdf. Accessed in Feb/2010.
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