Talking recently to a Deputy Mayor of Paris -Jean-Louis Messica- we had the positive surprise to discover that Paris has a plan regarding Data. In a initial step, it would be just to progressively give access to a set of raw data and let the community of data-geeks play with it. Just doing that is a challenge, in the sense that it changes to way processes work in their -big and internal- IT department. But the plan is to progressively implement some processes that make that any new data becomes accessible to anyone -except, obviously if it comprehends some sensible information regarding security or personal issues-. You wouldn’t guess how large is the amount of data that a Mayor House can gather: If covers as broad as data of the pollution, traffic, energy, school attendance, nursery allocation, rivers level, number of trees in any given street, street cleaning frequency, etc… No need to say that these data are as many way to increase the democracy transparency, and furthermore the efficiency of the City’s operation departments.
But when it comes to budget and finance lines, it seems less obvious that these would become available soon. As in many organization, the concern is that if people have no way to benchmark the invested amount in a given item, budget transparency might feed-back badly with nothing else than criticism that would blunt the effort of transparency. This aspect might become a reality thanks to the commitment of people like Stanislas Boutmy, who founded the Public Evaluation System<http://www.public-evaluation.com/index.htm>, which aims at providing a financial rating for each public office either Region, Department, City, etc. He doesn’t necessarily works for the City of Paris, (they have some agreement with Fitch NetRating), but his approach is one among many which force the public agencies to further understand that it is now time to shift the due transparency to a higher level. There is still a long way to go before that we get into the democracy 2.0, but we are moving toward it. http://captaindash.com/2010/04/03/paris-the-city-of-love-and-datavisualization/ -- Mon weblog - http://www.tenshu.fr/ Je soutiens le Logiciel Libre, j'adhère à l'APRIL !
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