Digital Engagement

great stuff, if you're gonna get someone to help you then get the best! well done

Good news - let's hope we can better what's happening in the US on releasing gov data!

Well, that's an excellent name to have. I do hope you won't take his name in vain. Who's actually going to do the work?

It says the Digital Engagement team gonna do the work. hmm. Hope they listen to Tim, without him there would be no internet to digitally engage peeps in the first place. The main problem in the UK is that only those sat on exchanges can get a decent enough connection to engage digitally. The rest won't come on board cos their link to the ether is too ropey to waste time buddying up to govt. When they get online it takes them all their time to do essentials. They don't blog, or read blogs or comment. 3 million homes at least won't be able to access egov.

Gov2.0 and Data

An important thing happened today, and hopefully it will influence the Gov2.0 direction that the UK takes.

I wrote some <a href="cabalamat.wordpress.com/.../a> for TBL on my blog earlier today. To summarize:

(1) Use open data formats.

By this I mean formats which: have a standard published under an open content license; are not encumbed by patents; have an open source reference implementation.

(2) Don’t restrict this just to central government.

Opening up data should also apply to local government and devolved assemblies. Data from agencies at arms length from central government (so-called quangos) must also be included; because if they are not, there will be a temptation to hide things that might be embarrassing by putting them there. (The same applies to charities that are mostly funded by the state.)

In particular there are two agencies whose data should be opened up: Ordnance Survey, and the BBC.

(3) What license should the data be released under?

One possibility is that all this data should be put into the public domain. That’s a nice, simple solution.

But perhaps the government could get more value out of the data by releasing it under a CC BY-SA license, which requires that all licensees “share alike” by putting derived works under the same license.

(4) Include detailed data on overnment spending.

Christopher Chantrill’s UK Public Spending website gives statistics for public spending, which you can drill down by category. But it doesn’t go into much detail, and therefore something better could be done: a much more fine-grained listing of government spending where each department and agency details everything, with each contract over a certain value (say £10,000) being listed separately. This data could all be put on a central website, but it’s more important that the raw data be made available in a standard format.

Oops, the url got mangled -- here it is again cabalamat.wordpress.com/.../

In response to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's call for suggestions about opening up government data, I have a couple thoughts that I hope may be useful.

A Presumption of Openness

Hitherto the UK government has worked on the basis that things are secret unless there is a good reason for revealing them.  Typically that has required submitting Freedom of Information requests – often a long and frustrating process.  We need to reverse that presumption so that openness is the default.  I would like to propose that the government is required to file “Imprisonment of Information” requests in which it must justify why particular data is not revealed.  Framing things in this way would also help get the message across to those working in government that the onus is on them to argue for the absence of openness, not the other way around.

The Data Process Must be Open

Making data available on its own isn't enough; we also need to be able to see where that data came from, and who has worked on it – effectively, a change-log for open data.  This is particularly important when it comes to legislation: for full transparency, we need to see who did what to bills and when.

1. Really hope the post means what it says - single point of access and not the precursor to some demand for a single central repository.

2. Metadata and mandating the creation and publishing of metadata (using RDF and Linked (Meta) Data principles) shoujdl be at the heart of this process; make it discoverable and we will come - this is the "access" that most users seek - the freedom to understand. Different discussion about the terms on which data is then used of course depending on the nature of the agency.

3. "get over it" is a frequently heard counter-point to those who would argue that (to paraphrase) "civil liberties are threatened by open data"; easy to say and utterly glib. Anonymisation and aggregation of data will be integral to any accessibility - again, metadata around the aggregation geographies and methods will identify the utility of the data to those who are interested in it.

4. It seems Linked Data demands that certain parts of RDF are not used therein - strange but standards evolve I guess.

I'm from Brazil and I would like very much having a channel like this for disclosure of data of public services here. But due to great corruption we have in our country these data will never be disclosed. Congratulations! This is truly a democratic country. Thank you.

It's very glad to know that Tim Berners-Lee  has agreed to help the UK government by keeping his information accessible on the web and Digital Engagement team supports his work. This will bridge gap between people and the UK government.