Beyond a permissive regime around the availability of data, the City will also need to allow companies to make a market, and to charge, for the value-added services they build on top of the public platform. Certainly, companies should not be charging for the mere redistribution of the data, but they should be permitted — indeed encouraged — to build user-friendly front-ends, interesting “mashups,” innovative analyses, and inventive integrations of the platform’s data.
My buddy Andrew rocks the NYC city council on open data. He brings up a couple of red herrings (like SOAP and the notion of open data == open source which nobody outside of Planet Microsoft is actually confused about) but all in all, this is terrific work. I would love for somebody to lay the same kind of smackdown on the SFMTA board.
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