Open Government in UK, not in USA...

"Making government information accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people" [11june09]

An article on today's New York Times, co-written by the ReadWriteWeb staff, points out that UK's Prime Minister has asked the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in "opening up of access to Government data in the web" - a move seemingly aimed at showing "Obama How It's Done".

Here below a few excerpts:

«"So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month." Can't you picture Barack Obama making that statement? He didn't though; that was the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a statement about electoral reform, according to a report from Charles Arthur of the Guardian.

The Obama administration has had a mixed record so far in terms of opening up government data.

The White House said yesterday that it has clearly heard the public call for more open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces filled with open data) - so things certainly won't be standing still on this side of the Atlantic either. US CIO Vivek Kundra wrote an excellent blog post on the challenges and opportunities of open government data on Monday.

In other words, Berners-Lee is a hard core advocate of open data. It's hard to imagine a more high profile move for a government to take than to announce that he's coming on board to help the effort.»

Read the full article here.