[grawprog]

>Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity

I think this was one of my biggest shocks doing work for the government, collecting public data, payed by tax funded grants. Public data isn't for the public.

We went into this project with all these starry eyed dreams of making a public online database and freely posting everything we collected, with maps and interactive tools, status reports. It was part of our grant proposal.

Then reality came and we found out public data meant a government password protected database with access fees where our data would be available to people willing to pay for it or we'd lose our funding. The data were for companies or individuals willing to pay the government not for the public.

This still doesn't sit well with me nearly 6 years later. That was never what we wanted out of that project and it wasn't what was planned or accepted when we wrote our proposal.

[Wowfunhappy]

How much did access cost?

Ideally, I'd prefer the data be free, but if the fee was (mostly) nominal, I'd consider that almost as good...

[crankylinuxuser]

Simply put, this government isn't ours. It belongs to the corporate heads and the monied elite and the lobbyists who write the laws that are uusually summarily passed by congress.