David Megginson has been involved with open technologies for two decades, including a stint as chair of the World Wide Web Consortium’s XML Core Working Group. As a consultant, David has spent the past 15 years helping public and private organizations implement open information technology, including creating the XML schema for the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). David is also the author of two books on open information standards, Structuring XML Documents (Prentice-Hall, 1998) and Imperfect XML (McGraw-Hill, 2004), and 2000 winner of the Java Technology Achievement Award For Outstanding Individual Contribution to the Java Community from Sun Microsystems.
Is access to open public data a service, like education, or a right, like free speech? Services are optional Governments collect taxes and use the money to provide services to their citizens. Because tax revenue is finite, no government can provide all possible services to all people all of the time, so a government has