There has been quite a lot of discussion about opening up government data over the last couple of months, both here and in other jurisdictions. In 2007, I posted on the UK government’s Power of Information report, and the potential social and economic value that could be unlocked. At that time Statistics New Zealand were one of the few agencies making their data available.
Recently, Glen Barnes and Nat Torkington launched the Open Data Catalogue and it is encouraging to see how much government data has been submitted in such a short space of time. There are currently more than fourty data sets on the site, from central and local government agencies. These sets range from economic data provided by the Treasury, geospatial data, various sets of energy data and a collection of directories and registers.
The point to bear in mind as you scroll down this list, though, is that these sets represent a fraction of the data the Crown holds. This catalogue could easily extend to hundreds of pages…
So, while we celebrate the initiative of the Ministry for the Environment releasing data under a Creative Commons license, for example, it might be worth pausing and considering how we can accelerate this process.
That conversation is already taking place on the Open Government Ninjas List, where one of the threads has been about the barriers to opening up government data.
While I agree that most of these reasons have some currency, none resonate as much as the senior American official talking to John Geraci of O’Reilly:
There were some interesting apps in there, but overall they didn’t meet with the mayor’s agenda for the city.
Open Gov Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue
This (completely guileless?) admission underscores for me what is the critical issue in opening up government data: culture change.
It’s not about the technology. It’s not about data quality. Or privacy. Or commercial sensitivity, or any of that stuff. That should all be dealt to as part of the everyday functioning of any administration. It is about accepting that we, the government, collect and manage this information on behalf of citizens and that it is our fundamental responsibility to make it available to them in a way that supports the creation of public and economic value.
This isn’t an add-on, or a ‘nice to do.’ It’s an integral part of our operating environment now.
There is an Open Data BarCamp planned for later this year. Come along and be part of the change.
Photo: Justin Marty
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[...] said, as Jason Ryan notes in a recent NSPC blog post, although there are more than 40 datasets on the Open Data site from central and local government [...]