Government shutdown causing linked open data to go away

Question

With the government shutdown now upon us, and many groups going to be performing an 'orderly shutdown' of their systems in a few hours...

How can systems that rely on linked open data make sure that they don't introduce a single point of failure by using data from other systems?

Are there any recommended best practices, other than simply crawl any sites you rely on and maintain your own cache?

(due to the timing of this, I'm mostly interested in how do we deal with this now that this is happening, rather than preventative measures to be taken in advance)

Answer 1

Archive.org might have already crawled the site for you. Check out the Way Back Machine: http://wayback.archive.org/web/query?type=urlquery&url=&Submit=Go+Wayback!

Answer 2

There's a conversation going on about this within the OpenNews community, which may have interesting info for you.

Dan Sinker wrote an article on the topic for Source, see http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/us-shutdown-scuttles-data/.

Also, during the October 9 OpenNews call, there was a detailed discussion about access to government open data during the shutdown, see the Etherpad for a log (first item in the Etherpad): https://etherpad.mozilla.org/opennews-calls-Oct9.