This is a quick note for the Web Foundation Open Government Data guys
looking at Chile as a candidate.
To the list of virtues that we all love and cherish add the following
political topping:

Mr Piñera:
By implementing and enforcing Linked Open Data policies during this
presidential ( 2010 - 2014 ) period you will achieve two things:
* Easily reveal the status of "currently" mis-managed ( ehem. Corrupt
) institutions. This data need not be analyzed now, but it will stay
"for the record" and someone will join the dots ( a University, NGO,
etc ).
* Dramatically increase the visibility of all transactions during the
next administration. This will most probably be a deterrent for all
those trying to return to a job where they make money w/o moving a
finger. ( and, yeah. A corruption killer as well ).

Piñera has 3 years to make a change to the platform. OGD provides a
unique opportunity to make such positive, irreversible and strategic
change with long term projection and high ROI.

Also, for short term ROI, there is PR: being amongst the first
countries to get on top of Linked Data powered OGD.

Regarding execution strategy: Grassroots is not an option, we need the
govt, money and a LAW.

For those contacting me for this very same purpose today (
participating in Open Data in Chile ), my official statement is this:
I have the will to provide support, training and participate in such
effort as long as we go all the way up to the president. I don't want
to spend any more time fighting middle ranks that only lead us to more
bureaucracy. I already burnt too much money and you should learn from
this experience.

No grassroots. We don't have a large enough developer base.
No middlemen. They don't have the authority to "hand over" the data,
much less implement repeatable and sustainable processes ( which cost
money ).

Also. Beware of big tech companies here who are used to getting ALL
govt projects. The only way OGD will work is if we democratize this
and create an open ecosystem, right from the source.

So,
1. Remember the pitch above
2. Aim for grants for small teams, including universities
3. Avoid big companies that will try to land EXCLUSIVE contracts
4. Define a set of no more than 5 easy practices that should be enforced by law.

This is a huge infrastructure biz opportunity as well. So watchout for
the sharks. Of course, WF directors know that.

Keep it open

And bring it on ;) !!!

The easiest way to understand what the next stage of the web will be
like is to take a deep look at Facebook.
Zuckerberg got it right. He (they) managed to attract users and build
a web within the web because he solved the two most critical pending
issues:

1. Structured-ness
2. Identity

Facebook tackled structuredness by simplifying the problem first.
Instead of trying to model "all the possible things" that exist on the
web, they chose to structure the 20% that generates 80% of the value (
people, events, relations, etc ) in the activity that was most
unattended. ( social interaction ). They may have started aiming for
something simpler, but I am sure they figured this out sooner rather
than later. The graph! They were hosting the famous goddam graph
within the web!

Identity was a consequence of getting structured-ness right. Plus, it
was easily achievable, enforcable and distributable within a walled
garden.

Notice that this is all they did. Fix two issues. With that in place,
users and developers simply filled in the blanks.

Now the blue empire is starting to piggyback our browsing activity to
bring the whole web inside of their framework via a set of protocols
and APIs ( opengraph, stream, likes, connect ). This is natural, and
smart. It may sound terrifying to some, but it is actually good for
all of us.

Why?

Well, because the biggest barrier was never technical. It was our
perception of how the web was supposed to be. People got it wrong and
steering the ship proved to be harder than expected. Facebook is
kindly teaching us to "expect" single sign on, to "demand" a portable
graph of friends; In short: to dissociate the data from the container.

Developers are slowly figuring it out now. They are realizing that
there has always been built-in structured-ness in the web and that
they were somehow misled to believing that things were hard. In fact,
they are even simpler than Facebook puts it.

The identity part, on the other hand, has not always been there. But
it is finally crystallizing after several experiments ( OpenID, OAuth,
etc ).

You will soon make a "record" for yourself in this giant database, and
it will all start making sense ;)

Structured-ness and Identity.
The two new features that the web will massively roll-out starting 2011:

Linked Data + WebID