Kyle: Alright so this is Kyle from Dallas Texas, and in Denton we just started using Dkan as an open data platform for enabling our developer community into contributing back to the city. So I'm here with...
Andrew: Andrew Hoppin
Kyle He is with Nucivic; they are the creators of Dkan and he's gonna tell us a little more about it. Tell us a little about Dkan.
Andrew: Sure, so Dkan is a version of the Drupal content management system, or a distribution of the Drupal content management system; geared to letting you have an open data catalog out of the box, without a lot of work to do to set it up.
Kyle:So how do you think the Dkan can help enable communitites like, you know where I'm from; like Denton and enabling their community to contribute to open data and you know, civic transparency...
Andrew: Sure, so most communities have websites right? Whether it's your meet up group, or local community organization, or government and we put a lot of content on there. We put a lot of information on there, but often times where we miss is the actual data about what we do and what we need in the day to day lives of our community; but governments have a lot of data and we're making it easy with Dkan to publish not only the content, you know the stories about what's going on in government; the press releases, calendar events and all that stuff, but also the data what governments are doing and what they need and we hope that by opening up that data directly we'll be able to empower you know community organizations, nonprofits and companies in the community to get hands on. Get involved and most of all be aware of what's going on in their community through their government.
Kyle: Cool. So what do you think the advantage of using open source platform compared to proprietary platform would be for a community to to get on with Dkan?
Andrew: I'm pretty biased because I've been doing it for a long time, but I I think you know a bunch of things. First of all if you have local talent, if you have local you know technical talent, open source means you don't have to pay anybody. In many cases you can just do it yourself and you can do it with people that are civil servants, that work for the government. You can do with people that are volunteers for a community organization and of course you may have local businesses that have that talent. If you wanna hire-hire that kind of help so it gives all the choices in that regard and traditional proprietary software doesn't give you tough choices and it kind of seems like if--if it's your data, as a tax payer you paid for it; the government created it if their going to publish it and make it available to you to do something valuable with, maybe you shouldn't be using the proprietary technology that a single company owns to manage you open public data. That we all should own so it kinda seems like it fits philosophically as well.
Kyle: So where can we find more information about Nucivic and Dkan?
Andrew: So our company's Nucivic.com N U C I V I C.com and you can find a lot about Dkan on there while we're the big team behind it's truly open to everybody and available to everybody don't have to pay us for it and you can also find it online if you just Google Dkan D K A N. You'll find the code on Github. You'll find the projects on Drupal.org and we really encourage you to come check it out and get involved and hopefully contribute back.
Kyle: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Andrew: Appreciate it.