NPSC Blog

The UK Cabinet Office has just released an independent review it commissioned into the ways government can better enable the public to access and reuse its information. The Power of Information [PDF 280 KB], co-authored by the founder and director of mySociety – a charitable project that connects people with their governments and communities, makes some impressive recommendations and draws a compelling picture of the (largely untapped) value of government information.

The review proposes a simple vision:

that citizens, consumers and government can create, reuse and distribute information in ways that add maximum value.
p.20

The authors then go on to propose a three point strategy to enable government to make the most of the opportunities afforded by unlocking its information. They suggest government:

• welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
• supplies potential re-users with the public sector information they, when they need it, in a way that maximizes the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
• protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

In the post on the principles of Govt 2.0, I discussed the importance of this practice, ‘open sourcing government.’ But before we (here in New Zealand, or any other jurisdictions for that matter) are in a position to transform the .govt.nz namespace into one that actively encourages this sort of value transfer, we need to look at how we are making the information available in the first place.

Data web

The use and re-use of government information is predicated on the ability to find the right information at the right time, and for it to be made available in a way that enables people and/or machines to access and, where necessary, manipulate it. The review has an interesting counter example of this:

‘I got in touch with the Stern report team, because I wanted to republish it in a format that people could easily read and discuss on the internet. I couldn’t make the person at the other end of the phone line understand why I didn’t want the report in 600 page PDF format. So I said I wanted to be able to read it on my phone. He told me to get a better phone.’
p. 19

The irony of this review only being available as a PDF aside, this anecdote illustrates a classic public sector myopia around the publishing process: “We’ve put it on the web, we’re done.” When what is really called for is a vision of the publishing process as a value chain that begins when agency information is being marked up for publication.

However, this requires a revolution in the thinking that we bring to the management of government information. Everything that we publish becomes viewed as a potential resource for the public and private sectors to consume, syndicate, mashup and reinvent for social and economic benefit.

A local example is Statistics New Zealand, who have just launched a programme to make their data available to businesses.

The Cabinet Office review cites 2006 figures from the Office of Fair Trading that estimate that improved availability of information to re-users could double the direct market value of public sector information to £1.1 billion per year (another pdf).

Unlocking some of this value is the challenge before us. Microformats and semantic markup in general are a good first step, and another compelling reason why public sector communicators should be familiar with HTML. It is our job to describe and champion this value chain within our agencies.

Conclusion

Mor Naaman, in his post The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”), points out that most people will be unwilling to mark their pages up semantically therefore what we will see emerge is a ‘bottom-up’ semantic web built from lightweight solutions like microformats and Flickr machine tags. This is probably the case, and a good reminder that web standards are not an end in themselves.

It should also remind us that as public servants we have an additional responsibility to ensure that the information that we publish – in addition to being accessible by all – can be re-used by people and businesses to generate social and economic value.

Photo: dltq