March 2011: Open Data News and Resources

March 2011 was a busy month for the open-data community. data.gov.uk was tracking just over 5,500 datasets; the federal data.gov was tracking over 390,000 datasets (a number partly inflated by the inclusion of geospatial subset records); and the OpenStreetMap community was finalising the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's response coordination work after the February Christchurch earthquake and was beginning to organise around the early Tōhoku earthquake response that began on March 11.

On the tooling side, March 2011 saw the OpenSpending project — the Open Knowledge Foundation's government-finance-visualisation platform — launching beta deployments for several countries; the Where Does My Money Go? UK budget visualisation was an ongoing reference; and Sunlight's Influence Explorer was iterating rapidly on its pre-2012-election dataset coverage. Code for America's first fellowship cohort was about three months into their city placements (Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington DC, New Orleans).

Monthly roundup format pieces like this one are a useful artefact for any historian trying to reconstruct the operational tempo of the open-data community in the early 2010s. The conferences, the dataset releases, the tooling launches, and the international coordination episodes all happened on a rhythm that the standalone archive of any individual project doesn't recover. The roundup form preserves the cadence.