As I said when I posted on open data earlier this year:

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.

The open data site is a very positive step forward in that direction.

A not so positive step forward; indeed, more a cautionary tale for public sector managers, is the headlong rush to capitalize on the positive engagement that open government initiatives are triggering around the world. It is genuinely difficult to understand the emergence of cardigan chic, but it is a phenomenon nonetheless. Transforming government is a business that everyone wants to be in; from social media consultants whose experience in the sector can be measured in a page full of tweets to corporations blinded by a sense of their own beneficence…

Adobe’s Open Gov site is an alarming example of the latter. The site is 100% Flash based. It’s like building a website to promote philanthropy — and charging people to view the content. The site is intended to:

promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of “opening up Washington,” as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. Ars Technica

Publishing data in proprietary formats alone, or as the primary media, is a very bad idea. It does not lead to openness, it does not lead to transparency and it most certainly isn’t in the public interest. As the Sunlight Foundation rightly point out:

if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn’t great for transparency or open data. Sunlight Labs

Currently, sixty-seven percent of New Zealand public sector agencies hold some information that they can no longer access. Publishing agency data in proprietary formats is only going to exacerbate that issue…

DIA should be applauded for building the open data catalogue. It is an important step in opening up government information. It is, however, only one step. Agencies should be looking at registering their data sets, but they should also be looking at using open standards for that data.

By way of a disclosure, I have provided a small amount of advice to DIA about this project, but certainly not enough to prevent me commending the initiative (or sufficient for me to legitimately bask in any reflected approbation).

Photo: Swiv

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