In my opinion, we can’t really ignore government and should allow the to submit. I think it will help us to achieve the goal of having a civil discourse between government and civil society. In addition, we can’t always know who are government officials and we don’t have a way to prevent them from submitting to the index.
I think that we do need to encourage people to comment on government submissions and to monitor them. The new review system of topical reviewers should assist to also reduce the bias of submissions for government. since it looks at all datasets, not on a country.
they go to the effort and cost to publish the data (often without direct benefit)
they know where the data is and can comment on future plans
their standing in the census is a little reward for the good work they’ve done and some ideas for improvements
I have no problem with governments making submissions but they should not do reviews.
Ideally these submissions could be done collaboratively at some event so others learn more about the data, the census, and start to cooperate on creating value using the open data.
I think the most important thing is to identify the correct dataset(s). Once this is done, a submission can be commented on by many, and reviewed by experts leaving little opportunity to game the system.