Jung Tae Young
The energetic member Jung Tae Young is a student in Chung Ang University studying at documents and records grads school. She is not just a student that reads books in research labs but is our member that also agonizes about the current society and participates actively. We always thank you! :D
Translated by SOORIN KIM(voluntarily activist)
Open Government is the new trend in America.
Open Government is a new trend in Korea too.
It sounds like the same ‘Open Government’ but the enormous differences can be seen in the White House homepage.
This is a where the ‘Open Government Initiative’ is introduces in the website. The Obama administration completed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government June 2009 and gathered of June public consensus. Finally, December 2012, published ‘Open Government Directive’ which collected both the government and citizens’ opinion.
This directive contains online public information of government(timely public information promotion for citizens’ search and download without obstacles by open format), improvement in quality of information(secure transparency of federal government’s spending by focusing on quality of information regarding the expenditures of each departments and objectivities), promotion of government’s open culture and institutional settlement of it(federal open government dashboard to share domestic and foreign advanced examples), establishment of political framework to expand transparent publicity of government(improvement in laws and political framework for reinforcement of national competence through development of information technology).
As to this, main departments released ‘Open Government Flagship Initiatives’ and all the results are all here in this website. Through this site, the White House’s transparency, participation and collaboration are all realized.
To begin with, DATA.COM is a data center that opens not only the raw data such as transportation, medicine, crime, obesity, employment or health but also tool data and geographical data. Even expanding from this, IT DASHBOARD(ir.usaspending.gov) provides federal government’s information budget, RECOVERY.GOV(recovery.gov) provides information about government’s spending on economy which is 82 billion and USA SPENDING.GOV(usaspending.gov) provides information on public tax regulation and usage. Challenge.gov(challenge.gov) is to listen to people’s opinion on problems government departments or institutions are having. When the government offers prize and the problem project to solve, people use the information in DATE.GOV to suggest ideas or solutions.
The United States of America share this numerous data sets in forms of linked data. Also, through public contest the government is making trend that produce additional values by idea sites, applications or visual services. New York is awarding inventors that create new, helpful and commercial applications with public information.
What is Korean open government then? There is an answer in the Q&A of ‘The People’s Voice’. They say that the public information system(www.open.go.kr) is the open government. We can see the enormous difference between America and Korea both visually and level(both quantity and quality).
Public Information Support Center(www.pisc.or.kr) created last year also shows the difference. The organization shows the list of 351 cases of information database and talk as if it’s going to open them all. It’s like ‘the pie in the sky’. In reality, the information can only be open if one goes through three obstacles called registration, notification whether or not the information can be opened, and the negotiation of forms of providing the information.
Korean open government is still under construction just as Data.go.kr is right now.
original Korean version of this post and attached files
*short supplement.
This column written in April last. And recently, Data.go.kr is shown up its vulnerable and contrary to expectation substance.
Data.go.kr doesn’t providing information and data of most central governments and local governments regarding administration or execution of the budget. It generally provides public services for life information or convenience information searching.