Yesterday at the United Nations, President Barack Obama marked the Open Government Partnership‘s (OGP) third anniversary by announcing that in addition to the commitments outlined in the current U.S. OGP National Action Plan, “The United States will take additional steps to make our government more open, transparent, and accessible for all Americans.” Among the multiple new…

Some of these developments may be dated by a month or more, but we want to make sure they are on your radar by pointing them out here. Several open data portals have launched, including a Brazilian Open Data portal powered by the open-source data cataloguing software CKAN (run by the Open Knowledge Foundation –…

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter. While we gear up for the CC Global Summit that is just a week away, governments around the world continue to open up their data and adopt policies for maximum transparency and citizen engagement. Open government developments in…

In the past few months, the Australasian region has seen several developments building on their commitments to open government. 3D Globe at Seattle Central Library by brewbooks / CC BY-NC-SA Last week in New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government. The…

City Hall (Rathaus) by http2007 / CC BY For a while now, government data for the City of Vienna has been open for reuse under the CC Attribution license. In a more national effort, the City of Vienna, along with the Chancellor’s Office and the Austrian cities of Linz, Salzburg and Graz, recently coordinated their…

Mike Masnick at Techdirt asks Does It Make Sense For Governments To Make Their Content Creative Commons… Or Fully Public Domain? Ideally all Public Sector Information (PSI; government content and data) would be in the public domain — not restricted by copyright or any related rights. Masnick points to the U.S. federal government’s good policy:…

Open Government Data Venn Diagram by justgrimes / CC BY-SA You are invited to attend a workshop titled Open Government: Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards, organized jointly by Dr. Hanif Rahemtulla, Horizon Digital Economy Research and Puneet Kishor, Creative Commons. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the annual Open Source GIS…

Surburban Trends is one of the winners of the MashupAustralia Contest, and uses several CC BY licensed datasets. David Bollier writes in Viral Spiral, “Governments are coming to realize that they are one of the primary stewards of intellectual property, and that the wide dissemination of their work—statistics, research, reports, legislation, judicial decisions—can stimulate economic innovation,…

Dr. Hessa Al Jaber, Secretary General, ictQATAR / ictQATAR / CC BY Qatar’s Supreme Council for Information and Communication Technology, ictQatar, is among the many governments making waves by promoting openness and Creative Commons. During the welcome address at last weekend’s Digitally Open conference in Doha, the ictQATAR’s Secretary General Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber announced that…

Earlier this month, the Australian federal government issued an official response to the Government 2.0 Taskforce report which recommended, among other things, that Australian Public Sector Information (PSI) should be released under CC BY as default. The response (licensed CC BY) included a commitment to the development of a comprehensive set of IP guidelines which…