What is basic your idea of your initiative and what are you trying to accomplish with it?
The basic idea and what we are trying to accomplish is to make data that is public by law machine readable. This means, for example, that if it is required by law to disclose info about a tender, today a scanned photo of the contract proposal (an the contract itself) in a form of a PDF is made available somewhere on a website of a city (sometimes they do not do it electronically at all). That is useless for any kind of automated processing. What we want them to do is to publish the information as structured data (XML, RDF) so that anyone interested in the data can write a simple script to use the data in any form and for any purpose he may want. This may lead to a rise of some very interesting applications doing some statistics and aggregations of public data.
How much time did it take to launch the project before it went live?
It didn't take long, mainly because our website does not do anything. We contact public administration and ask them if they would like to participate and we suggest solutions of the problem and show them how easy it is to publish data in a machine readable way. So we started with an idea and then it went quickly as a member of parliament was doing an interview with the press and mentioned our initiative as a possible source of technical expertise in the area of publishing of public data. So we were approached and had to establish a site very quickly. It took about a week. The first reactions were quite positive, but, of course, public administration will not do anything unless it brings some benefits to it (mainly political benefits). So we had to work quite hard on our argumentation knowing, that eventually, we will be confronted by the corrupt politicians, whom the wide availability of public data could expose.
Did and how the idea change since Day1?
The idea hasn't changed since Day 1. However, the means that we approach it did. Quite naturally, we at first wanted the data to be completely structured, well described and so on, but we came to an obstacle that in public administration, nothing gets done voluntarily, if it costs non-trivial amount of effort. So we had to divide want we wanted into several tiers, and currently we are starting with something very easy, which is an RDFa annotation of information about tenders and we start with 10 pilot cities, which already publish tender information on their web (but in the useless way I have mentioned above).
What are your plans for near and further future?
Our plans for future are simple. We want to show everyone that the machine readable public data is achievable (we are inspired byhttp://data.gov.uk) and what can be done with it. Then we hope the process will be started and that it may some day even get a support in legislation. We simply want to "push" authorities to publish public data properly.
What is/was your main obstacle while developing and running your project?
The main obstacle is lack of time (we do this for free in our spare time).