The ongoing challenge in the Open Data community is to understand where restrictions on data exist, and to create grounds for public appeal to data owners for changes to terms of use. While the discussion is taken to a high political level on certain widely acknowledged datasets, there are many relevant and useful sources of information, which may even be published online and accessible, yet are still not open due to their legal definition - or lack thereof!

An option for most people is to go through a Freedom of Information request process, but they may not be willing to go “all the way”. Something like an Open This Data! button, even just a simple hashtag could organize a wider community appeal. It would be interesting to both data activists and researchers, to know where there is data that is going unused due to licensing.

As Opendata.ch president André Golliez recently said in an interview “the legal situation (of open data) is one of the largest medium-term problems. There are many constraints, such as on how data can be published. Everybody is anchored in law. Only data on which no restrictions are attached, should be open.”

Let's give people a quick and easy way to express their wish that the data be free! Here are some possible hackday goals:

• Start crowdsourcing a database of not-so-open data
• Develop an easy way of sharing dataset restrictions, like a browser bookmarklet button
• Seed the database and create an early visualization, a preview of the “not-so-open-data map”

Further links:

• The Open Data Certificate is a badge for truly open data (in varying degrees of truly) https://certificates.theodi.org/
• PyBossa is a Citizen Science framework that could be adapted as a tech platform http://dev.pybossa.com/
• The OKFN's Frictionless Data effort should be expanded to cover the legal status of data sets http://data.okfn.org/about
• Freedom of Information websites could be a trove of data on existing appeals for data openness https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/wiki/List-of-foi-websites-and-projects
• GitHub has recently taken a similar initiative to encourage licensing of projects https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing
• An inspiration for this is a parallel initiative, the Open Access Button, who are going to be also taking part at OKCon http://oabutton.wordpress.com/

(screenshots or sketches up here)

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