I’ve been working on the literature review section of my dissertation write up in the last week or so – and as part of that I started putting together a time-line of events that I thought were important in the development of current open government data initiatives in the UK.
You can see version 0.1 of such a timeline below. Click for the full size version.
The events included are those that seemed to me to be most relevant in accounting for how we got here – trying to capture both government activities and activities from the wider community of open data advocates / users – and looking at how events in Europe and the USA impacted upon UK policy and practice.
The list of events is by no means exhaustive, and I’m aware it’s fairly light right now on European context (particularly later in the timeline… e.g. th PSI Directive has had influence from 2005 onwards, but not sure what events would capture that?) and on picking out which ‘community’ activities were significant at different stages.
However, in the spirit of the argument that having open data can help error and omissions to be identified and corrected quicker, the Google Spreadsheet of events I used to generate this is available online here and you can add events using this simple form. So – feel free to add to, update and use these events; or just drop in a comment to let me know what you think is missing, or whether you think this timeline tells the right story…
Tangential postscript: The image above was manually created in Omnigraffle. After much wrangling with SIMILE Timeline (I’m a big fan of SIMILE Exhibit…so turning to Timeline seemed natural) I found I couldn’t get SIMILE Timeline to present the timeline information from the Google Spreadsheet in anything visually similar to the timeline I ended up creating manually. At a recent Delib event we spent quite a lot of time talking about the potential value of better timeline visualisation online – particularly of government policy processes, but after searching around, I can’t find any other good and portable timeline mash-up frameworks that offer the ease of the Google Maps style embedding into a site. A gap in the market for a new open source project perhaps?
I would like to contact the author of the time line and to understand how this was set-up. In the Netherlands we are still in very early phase.
Hey Arthur
What did you want to know? About the way the timeline graphic itself was put together, or about the contents – and the process of open data developing in the UK?
Feel free to ask any questions in the comments here, or if you want to talk direct – you can reach me on tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk.
All the best
Tim