Pragmatics of opening up government data

A new group in NZ called Opengovt.org is making public data sets available free of charge.

This article reporting on the initiative raises a couple of interesting questions about the cost associated with making government data more available.

When I worked in NZ government I was involved in developing pricing policy for government info.  From memory, the policy was that for non-personal government data that had already been collected and used for its original purpose, the price to any other party should be the marginal cost of dissemination.  This seemed to be a step in the right direction. As an example, the price of a major geospatial dataset fell from $3MILLION TO $3000 dollars.

If somebody wanted the data in a form other than the original, then an agency would look at the feasibility of doing this and, if possible oblige and charge the requester the full cost of transformation (the argument being why should taxpayers fund that cost?).

It looks like technology is now shifting the goal posts around this -  could be time for that policy to be reviewed.