A couple of days ago Alberto Cottica (author of the interesting Wikicrazia – unfortunately for me in Italian) announced a major step in Open Data in Italy
A few weeks ago, after a happy hour in Rome, people started spontaneously to share links on Italian open data and tools to crunch them with. With a few others, I thought it would be nice to collect these links in one place, a sort of one stop shop for people interested in transparency not just in theory, but in the practice of extracting information from public data. One thing led to another, and today Spaghetti Open Data is born.
In the English text about Spaghetti Open Data acknowledges the importance of making open data available:
Consider it a gift. For all its shortcomings, our democracy is a great gift from the past generations: the least we can do is take care of it as best as we can.
Among the gifts of democracy is the theory of openness. Without openness and free speech democracy is somewhere between handicapped and useless. While we now have the technology to increase openness & make transparency viable on a level previously impossible this has not translated automatically into a citizen friendly approach to government data. Initiative like Spaghetti Open Data provide us with excellent examples of steps in the right direction.