Help text and tool tips - 3. Publicly available?

Open Data Index
1

As mentioned over here, I’m proposing shorter text for the nine census questions. Here’s the third suggestion.

Question 3: Publicly available?
Currently

This mean the data the can be accessed by the public and it it is not restricted. Click “Show more” to she the conditions for publicly open. The data can be considered public when:

  1. It can be accessed online without the need for a password or permissions.
  2. If the data is in paper form, it can be accessed by the public and there is no restrictions on the number of photocopies that can be made.

Data is NOT publicly available in the following cases:

  1. It can be made available only after a freedom of information request (FOIA) is sent.
  2. It can be accessed only by government officials.

Proposed:

Can the data be accessed by the public without restrictions? Data is considered publicly available when:

  • it can be accessed online without the need for a password or permissions.
  • if the data is in paper form, can be accessed by the public and there is no restrictions on the number of photocopies that can be made.

Data is NOT publicly available when:

  • it is only made available after a freedom of information request
  • it can only be accessed by government officials.

The tool tip does not display well in this case. Issue raised on GitHub #618

972×930 164 KB

2

I can change it to bullet points, but I think empahsis should stay…

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3

What about data that is (at least in theory) available on request without using the FOI. That’s the claim in a number of jurisdictions with whom I have worked; data users typically do not consider such data as being “open”

4

Happy to remove FOI for the reasons stated by @dirdigeng and because not all countries have these laws or call them something different.

Can the data be accessed by the public without restrictions? Data is considered publicly available when:

  • it can be accessed online without the need for a password or permissions.
  • if the data is in paper form, can be accessed by the public and there is no restrictions on the number of photocopies that can be made.

Data is NOT publicly available when:

  • it is only made available after making a request.
  • it can only be accessed by government officials.

Does that work?

5

@Stephen - Yes, but I will add FOIA as well. People tend to be confused with all of these defentions. Since this is a help text, I see it useful to add it.

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