This week’s launch of the Irish Government’s Open Public Service Reform Plans, included a set of objectives in relation to Open Data, along with new commitments in areas such as cloud computing and shared services.

The reform plan establishes the internet as a means of providing new services to deliver more citizen centric public services, whilst providing greater value for money.

The reform agenda is based on five major commitments to change. These include a focus on customer service, establishing innovative delivery channels, reducing costs through better value for money, establishing new ways of working, and a focus on the implementation and delivery of the plan. There is an emphasis on online services, and e-Government initiatives as a platform upon which these commitments can be delivered.

Five Commitments to change

1) Placing customer service at the core of everything – though:

• the roll-out of a new Public Services Card to access Government services,
• the provision online and expansion of Government services performance information (in a similar vein to the current Healthstat initiative),
• the implementation of a single online application process for student grants.

2) Maximising new and innovative service delivery channels - through:

• the roll-out of additional online services including first time voter registration and the progressive roll-out of FixYourStreet.ie
• improved sharing of data on businesses through Revenue’s Business Register
• piloting the use of Cloud Computing in 2012 and evaluation of a roll-out across the Public Service
• roll-out of more innovative technologies to facilitate interactions with citizens (examples could include initiatives such as e-petitions)

3) Reducing costs to drive better value for money – through:

• reduction of 23,500 in Public Service numbers by 2015
• identification of new business models to support delivery of a range of non-core processes/services (e.g. outsourcing of IT of business processes through shared service centers)
• accelerating the reform of procurement and consolidation of ICT infrastructure through greater use of data centres

4) New ways of working – through:

• the implementation of shared services models in areas such as HR, Finance, Payroll, Banking and Pensions
• establishment of a Public Service Chief Information Officer (CIO) Council to assist and advise the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform on IT and eGovernment initiatives

5) Focus on implementation and delivery - through:

• reform and Delivery Office established to drive implementation and prioritisation
• establishment of consistent baseline performance information across a number of functional areas e.g. Finance, HR, ICT.

Open Data Commitments

The plan highlights transparency and better decision-making as outcomes from the release of more public data:

Citizens and businesses should have access to information on the availability and performance of key services. Increased sharing and publication of public data will increase transparency, aid the democratic process and drive better decision-making for individuals and businesses, as well as for Government and the Public Service.

Following on from this is a commitment to:

Publish data held by Public Service organisations online where possible within legal constraints. This should be explored both within the Public Service and with academic and private sector organisations, and should seek to identify how such publishing can be done in a way that provides value to the general public and facilitates the development of both free and commercial products.

Along with this, the plan outlines an objective to create a single portal through which public service data will be released (in a similar vein to data.gov and data.gov.uk):

Publish existing online information and services through a centralised portal to increase awareness and access. Leverage this portal to provide centralised and structured access to public service data online.

Lack of specifics

While the Government committed to plans in its Programme for Government, for example, to publish online ‘Every Purchase Order by a Government Department or agency for more than 20,000 online’, there is little by way of specifics in the reform plans regarding the data that will be released. A good idea might have been to setup an initial site (even a microsite of gov.ie), where citizens could suggest datasets for release – in a similar vein to data.gov.

Instead, the provision and release of Open Data is being driven by local authorities and other interested groups (e.g. DERI and their OpenData.ie site), rather than central Government. An Open Data conference held earlier this month in Galway, highlighted four local authorities as being the “poster children” of a growing worldwide movement to unlock public data.

Fingal County Council has pioneered an initiative with the three other local authorities in the capital to create a Dublinked data network. It has also established its own Open Data catalogue (which celebrated it’s first birthday recently), and is currently running an Apps4Fingal competition for ideas and apps based on this data.

Dominic Byrne of Fingal County Council, outlines the Open Data initiatives contained within these plans, and the Government’s commitment to the release of data:

..we are delighted to see the Government committing to the publishing of Open Data.  Fingal County Council looks forward to playing an active part in this next phase of Open Data in Ireland as more Irish Public Service organisations start publishing Open Data.

Nevertheless, in his analysis of the status of the Open Data movement in Ireland, Damien highlights the need for an Open Data Policy to underpin any Open Data infrastructure, and set the framework for licenses and formats. The current Reform plan does not set any dates for such a policy or directive, and does not commit to specific dates for the creation of a national Open Data portal.

Both Labour (in their Open Government Plan) and Fine Gael (in their New Politics Plan) have committed themselves to driving forward an Open Government agenda. Both plans include good initiatives and specifics in relation to empowering citizens, the creation of data.gov.ie and other accountability and transparency objectives.  The Government’s reform plan unfortunately lacks concrete commitments outlined in these plans. Thus, a more detailed Open Government plan (incorporating Open Data specifics) is required to act as a framework upon which the Public Service can build upon. The reform plan states how it wants to empower its people to lead and embrace change:

We will embed a strong culture of innovation and change across the Public Service centered on effective senior leadership and a relentless focus on results. This will enable a new Public Service equipped to meet the significant existing and future challenges through empowering its people to lead and embrace change. Above all, we must make it easier to access services and engage with Government whilst providing greatest value for money.

We’ve seen how local authorities can provide leadership in the provision of Open Data and the development of apps and services upon this . What’s needed now is an innovative Open Government plan to reform the principles upon which data is held by Government, and allow for its release and reuse by citizens. Work on such a plan/blueprint is already underway by the Enterprise Ireland National Cross Industry Working Group on Open Data. This blueprint is expected to provide advice and guidance to Government on best practices in this area. Only once these best practices are put into action should we expect to see the kind of reforms necessary to ‘embed a strong culture of innovation and change across the Public sector’.

Promoting innovation through prizes and challenges has steadily become an accepted policy throughout many US government departments and agencies over the past few years. Consequently, research into what does and does not work, in the development of such initiatives is increasing important in advancing best practice in this area.

Earlier this year, the Case Foundation together with the White House Domestic Policy Council and Office on Science and Technology Policy, hosted a Promoting Innovation Summit to gather lessons and strategies on the use of prizes, challenges and open grant-making.

Benefits to using prizes and challenges

In his opening remarks, Jeff Zients, the nation’s first Chief Performance Officer, pointed to the transformative power of prizes and challenges:

The productivity boom has transformed private sector performance over the past decade, but the federal government has missed out on this transformation and lags far behind in terms of efficiency and service quality. The American taxpayer deserves more bang for their buck.

Earlier this year, Zients’ office prepared a memo giving guidance to heads of executive departments and agencies on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government. The memo outlines a number of benefits of such initiatives as tools for promoting open government, innovation, and other national priorities. These include:

• The ability to establish an important goal without having to choose the approach or the team that is most likely to succeed
• Enables sponsors to pay only for results
• Highlights excellence in a particular domain of human endeavor to motivate, inspire and guide others
• Increases the number and diversity of individuals, organizations and teams that are addressing a particular problem or challenge of national or international significance
• Improves the skills of the participants in the competition
• Stimulates private sector investment that is many times greater than the cash value of the prize
• Attracts more interest and attention to a defined program, activity or issue of concern
• Captures the public imagination and changes the public’s perception of what is possible

Challenge.gov

The memo also explained, how the federal government would make available a web-based platform for prizes and challenges. This would be used to support agencies in their execution of prizes:

This platform will provide a forum for agencies to post problems and invite communities of problem solvers to suggest, collaborate on, and deliver solutions. Over the longer term, the General Services Administration (GSA) will also provide government-wide services to share best practices and assist agencies in developing guidelines for issuing challenges. Additionally, GSA will develop, as expeditiously as possible, a contract vehicle to provide agency access to relevant products and services, including technical assistance in structuring and conducting contests to take maximum benefit of the marketplace as they identify and pursue contest initiatives to further the policy objectives of the Federal Government.

This platform – called Challenge.gov – recently went live to federal employees, and the General Services Administration (GSA) will open it to the public later this month. GSA explained the concept behind the site:

Challenge.gov is a new platform that allows federal agencies to post challenges, and at the same time, allows the public to find federal challenges. It’s now open to federal agencies to create challenges or showcase challenges from other platforms.

The platform behind Challenge.gov – ChallengePost – is already used by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Apps For Healthy Kids contest site. This has over 40,000 supporters and around 100 apps worth an estimated are worth over $5 million dollars. In exchange it is making $60k available in prizes.

Do’s and Don’ts

The Promoting Innovation report below is a summary of the lessons and shared learning discussed at the conference, and highlights some of the shining examples of the power and pitfalls of crowdsourcing ideas and innovation.

Whilst prizes and challenges can be powerful tools in driving change, the report highlights some definite Do’s and Don’ts. These include:

• Problems must be clearly defined with measurable outcomes and objective rules.
• Agencies must make sure authority and budgets are in place -  The Office of Management and Budget has recently issued guidance for agencies that are considering using prizes and challenges as a part of their fulfillment of the Open Government Directive.
• Challenges should be open and transparent – Agencies should not underestimate the effort it can take to ensure fairness amongst participants.
• Prizes don’t have to be money – The report notes how ‘a non-monetary prize that creates recognition can stimulate innovation – as can a contest that promises winning ideas will actually be used.’ As part of this, it highlights the President’s SAVE award in which the federal employee submitting the winning idea was given the opportunity to present the idea to President Obama in person, and have their idea included in the 2011 budget.
• Use the public for the right purpose – The are stories of inappropriate ideas rising to the surface of contests as the result of groups gaming a voting system or for other reasons. The UK’s Spending Challenge has been plagued by such issues, although it’s outcome is hailed a success by some.  The report suggests “voting systems often result in the most creative solutions being dismissed. It is not clear that making final evaluations is the right use of Web 2.0 tools when it comes to such contests”.

Challenges to implementation

The Promoting Innovation report, also highlights some of the key challenges agencies can face in introducing prizes and challenges. These include how to handle failure if the results are not what was expected, ensuring internal capacity and skills are available to administer such initiatives and managing the internal change associated with using prizes and awards to further policy goals.

While some of these concerns maybe mitigated through the use of Challenge.gov, McKinsey’s research on prizes highlights some of their limits and cautions against their use versus other philanthropic instruments. They explain that prizes are a good fit if there is a clear and achievable goal, and many solvers willing to absorb the risk of the effort:

Are there limits to the effective use of prizes? Of course! Good ones require clear objectives, a rich field of potential problem solvers, and competitors willing to take risks. Prizes work best when a field isn’t already flooded with funded research and the challenge is more to create a clever application of technology than a technology itself.

A rule of thumb holds that prizes are useful tools for solving problems for which the objective is clear, but the way to achieve it is not. By attracting diverse talent and a range of potential solutions, prizes draw out many possible solutions, many of them unexpected, and steer the effort in directions that established experts might not go but where the solution may nonetheless lie.

Along with this, Zients’ memo outlines many legal issues to be addressed by agencies in structuring prize competitions. These include compliance with Federal Advisory Committee Act legislation, Ethical issues and federal endorsement of products or services, Intellectual Property and many others.

Mindful of these concerns, Tom Kalil, Director White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained how agencies have the strong support of the President and OMB to use prizes and challenges as catalysts for innovation and policy formation:

I hope everyone who is here from the Federal Departments and Agencies will come away from this with a renewed sense that this is an important tool, that you will go back and talk to 5-10 of your colleagues to get them excited about this, and that if you run into people who say no you can’t do this, show them the OMB memo, show them that this is in the President’s Innovation Strategy, and know that you have not just permission to do this, but a strong affirmation from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, from the National Economic Council, [and] … from the OMB General Counsel’s Office.

Promoting Innovation Doc

Vivek Kundra on Prizes and Challenges

For more check:

• Summit keynote and panel videos, along with other interviews from the event.
• McKinsey report: And the winner is…Capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes
• Peter Corbett on How to create a civic innovation contest

A new government website called Your Freedom was launched today, offering members of the public the opportunity to voice their ideas and comments to reduce pointless regulation and unnecessary bureaucracy. The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg explained how this provides a real chance for the public to influence government policy:

It’s a totally new way of making policy. A totally new way of putting you in charge.

Announcing the initiative on his YouTube channel, Clegg encouraged the public to get involved and tell the government if they feel their rights have been infringed :

Be demanding of your liberty. Be insistent about your rights.

Every time you have had to fill out three versions of the same form, tell us about it. Every time you have felt snooped on by the state, tell us about it. Every unnecessary law, every mind-numbing rule, every time your rights have been infringed – now is the time to tell us about it.

Public input

The Your Freedom project asks citizens three questions:

• Which current laws would you like to remove or change because they restrict your civil liberties?

• Which regulations do you think should be removed or changed to make running your business or organisation as simple as possible?

• Which offences do you think we should remove or change and why?

In his video address Clegg cautioned that the government would not be able to respond to every suggestion – the site already crashed due to heavy traffic, and received 2,000 ideas in the first day  – but he promised that every comment would at least be read.

The site explains that its part of the Programme for Government and its aim to ‘create a more open and less intrusive society through the restoration of Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness’. The site allows the public to submit, comment on, or vote for ideas on how to “free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses.”

Users of the site will be able to comment on and rate their favourite ideas and relevant departments will then respond to the most popular workable ideas.:

Your ideas will inform government policy and some of your proposals could end up making it into bills we bring before Parliament to change the law.

So if there are any laws or regulations you’d like us to do away with, then submit your idea. If you see ideas here already that you like the look of, then rate them and get them moved up the list. And if there’s more you’d like to say, then talk to others in the comments section for each proposal.

The views expressed through the site will be taken into account in the Freedom Bill later this year.

Criticism

The site has already received a wide range of ideas, including as Simon Jeffery notes, calls to legalise cannabis and magic mushrooms. These topics also appeared prominently in US Open Government dialogue last year, but are unlikely to be seriously considered by a Conservative led government.

Clegg’s claims that this initiative represents “a totally new way of making policy”, however, could be countered by Labour’s highly successful Downing Street petition website launched in 2006. It is described as the:

largest non-partisan democracy site by volume of users ever, with over 8m signatures from over 5m unique email addresses, representing something like 10% of the entire UK population.

Jeffery notes some cynicism about the site launch on twitter:

When @GdnPolitics asked its Twitter followers what they thought about the Clegg initiative, replies came back along the lines of “I’m disappointed. I thought it was going to be a campaign to liberate Clegg from this ridiculous pseudo-coalition” or “FREE THE SHEFFIELD ONE“. When the question was re-phrased, people were still cynical. “A few token gestures to compensate for the coming pain, always goes down well…reminds me of the dentist’s lollipop,” said one.

This month has now seen the coalition’s launch two interesting online exercises – this, and the one asking public sector workers for ideas on ways to reduce government spending. Your Freedom seeks to build on the Conservative election pledge to try to open up the legislative process through providing citizens with an easy means to input into proposed policy. This is not without risks, however.  Ideas on legalising soft drugs are already some of the most popular suggestions on the site. If these prove to generate the most comments and approval, then the Government’s response will be an interesting test of how to manage online citizen feedback where diverges with government policy.

Further reading:

• Your Freedom
• Guardian article on Your Freedom launch
• ‘is [Your Freedom] the silliest new govt website or the most inspired?’
• BBC Newsnight discussion on Your Freedom

Earlier today, UK Prime Minister David Cameron kicked off a consultation exercise on ways to reduce government spending. Together with Nick Clegg he has written to public service workers asking them to share their ideas on where to make spending cuts.

A Spending Challenge website has been launched to solicit suggestions from Britain’s 6 million public sector workers. The challenge states that “Every single idea will be considered and the best ones taken forward by departments, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office”. Ideas will be analysed through a five step process:

1. All ideas considered by cross-government team
2. Serious ideas go to ‘champions’ team in Cabinet Office/Treasury
3. Most promising ideas sent to departments and Treasury spending teams to be worked up
4. Selected ideas reviewed by Ministers
5. Spending Review announced October 20th

The rational for the challenge is laid out in Cameron’s letter:

The biggest challenge our country faces is dealing with our huge debts – and that means we have to reduce public spending.

Reducing public spending will require innovative and challenging ideas, best developed by those working on the frontline of public services:

We want you to help us find those savings, so we can cut public spending in a way that is fair and responsible. You work on the frontbench of public services. You know where things are working well, where the waste is, and where we can re-think things so that we get better services for less money.

[...] Don’t hold back. Be innovative, be radical, challenge the way things are done. Every serious idea will be considered: by government departments, by the Treasury, by our teams in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office – and passed to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to make sure we don’t miss anything.

While the website states the government “will look at every single idea that comes in”, however, there is no guarantee any of the suggestions will make it through to the final Spending Review report in October. This will set detailed spending plans, with budget cuts of up to 25% over four years for many government departments.

The Spending Challenge will be opened to the general public from 9 July. A summary of all submissions will be published later this year.

Partner with Wikileaks

The Spending Challenge site will also monitor social media as a means of fulfilling its mandate to find innovative ideas for saving money. This represents a recognition that some of the most “out of the box” suggestions may be outlined by on blogs and forums, rather than a newly created government website:

Although this process allows you to submit ideas anonymously, we respect the fact that some people will not want to contribute directly to a government website.  As part of this exercise, we will monitor a range of blogs, social networks, forums and also http://wikileaks.org.

Save Award similarities

The UK Spending Challenge has many similarities to the Obama Administration’s SAVE (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency) Award. On launching last year’s competition President Obama called for “a process through which every government worker can submit their ideas for how their agency can save money and perform better.”

David Cameron’s recognition that public sector workers often have the best ideas was outlined by Jeffrey Zients, chief performance officer and deputy director for management in the Office of Management and Budget, when he said it was important to listen to the voices of those on the front lines:

In the government and in the private sector, it is often those in the front lines that have the best ideas and who know the most… We are looking for ideas that save money, improves the way the government operates by lowering costs, simplifying processes, streamlining processes, getting rid of unnecessary red tape and that has an impact on citizens’ lives. It could be a wide range of ideas.

The competition was seen as a success with over 38,000 ideas being submitted in the three weeks of the competition. Given this, the SAVE Award was turned into an annual event with President Obama issuing his own “spending challenge” to government workers:

I’ve issued a challenge to every man and woman who works for the federal government:  If you see a way that government could do its job better, or do the same job for less money, I want to know about it

Saving through Open Source

The twitter reaction to the launch of the new site has been generally positive. The initiative is one of the latest examples of the coalition seeking to harnessing the collective ideas and experience of those working outside of central government.

As a nod to this the website itself is based on a WordPress theme developed by Simon Dickson for the recent Programme For Government site. Seeing the government use Open Source tools for the website, and reusing previous themes, demonstrates the spirit of the spending challenge.

The extension and reuse of such open source technology throughout government could help to bring down the cost of government websites. The axing of many government websites has already been proposed by Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, but ideas from the public on reducing the costs of current sites e.g. through using free templates such as Govfresh’s Gov 2.0 theme, would be welcomed – especially when some current sites have a per visit cost of £11.78.

The winning idea from the US SAVE award is expected to save $2 million for 2011, and $14.5 million between 2010-2014. Any similar savings arising from the UK Spending Challenge should help establish the power of consultation with the public as a means of saving money and improving government efficiency.

Further reading

• Emergency Budget, Deficit and Cuts: Visualized
• Measuring Government Website costs
• Government to axe hundreds of ‘unnecessary’ websites
• Technology in a Cold Climate
• Govfresh Gov 2.0 theme
• SAVE Award

In David Cameron’s first podcast as British Prime Minister he outlined plans to make Government more transparent and allow people to hold ministers and public services to account.

One of the central themes of the podcast was that his government would be one that “gives power away to people instead it taking it from them.” He explained how a big part of this was providing the public with more information about government and especially how and where it spends its money (1:50 – 2:16):

It’s your money, your government, you should know what’s going on.

So we’re going to rip off that cloak of secrecy and extend transparency as far and as wide as possible. By bringing information out into the open, you’ll be able to hold government and public services to account. You’ll be able to see how your taxes are being spent. Judge standards in your local schools and hospitals. Find out just how effective the police are at fighting crime in your community.

Public Spending information

Cameron went on to explain how transparency could help “re-build trust in our politics”, through making politicians more accountable for their spending decisions. Analogous to this he previewed the release of details of “public spending over the past 12 months, information about hospital infections, and some of the salaries of senior officials in government.”

He warned, however, that the information would not be perfect, not always in the most convenient format or free from mistakes. Nevertheless, his view was:

I don’t want to hang around making sure everything is perfect – I want to get on with it, to make a start on this transparency revolution that we’re planning.

In time, I want our government to be one of the most open and transparent in the world.

Following on from the podcast, the Prime Minister sent a stark letter to all British government departments. It began with a stated commitment to hold public bodies to account, and ensure value for money in public spending:

Greater transparency across Government is at the heart of our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account; to reduce the deficit and deliver better value for money in public spending; and to realise significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data.

The Government must set new standards for transparency, and our Coalition Programme for Government sets out a number of specific commitments. The Government’s initial transparency commitments are set out below, alongside deadlines for publication. Limited exemptions on national security and personal privacy grounds will be permitted.

The commitments include:

• Historic Combined Online Information System (COINS) spending data to be published online in June 2010. – (Released on 4th June)
• All new central government ICT contracts to be published online from July 2010.
• All new central government lender documents for contracts over £10,000 to be published on a single website from September 2010, with this information to be made available to the public free of charge.
• New items of central government spending over £25,000 to be published online from November 2010.
• All new central government contracts to be published in full from January 2011.
• Full information on all DFID international development projects over £500 to be published online from January 2011, including financial information and project documentation.

Along with this he announced how this spending transparency would relate to local government:

• New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011 – (however, not forced by law).
• New local government contracts and tender documents for expenditure over £500 to be published in full from January 2011.

The priority attached to this was highlighted with the request to all departments to take “immediate action to meet this deadline for data transparency”:

Given the importance of this agenda, the Deputy Prime Minister and I would be grateful if departments would take immediate action to meet this timetable for data transparency, and to ensure that any data published is made available in an open format so that it can be re-used by third parties. From July 2010, government departments and agencies should ensure that any information published includes the underlying data in an open standardised format.

Of course, the release of the datasets specified in the Coalition Programme is just the beginning of the transparency process. In advance of introducing any necessary legislation to effect our Right to Data proposals, public requests to departments for the release of government datasets should be handled in line with the principles underpinning those proposals: a presumption in favour of transparency, with all published data licensed for free reuse.

Some journalists have likened this spirit of online transparency and the “Right to Data proposals” for government-held datasets, as akin to the US Public Online Information Act (POIA) where “public means online” is set as an operating principle for government.

Lifting the Government Spending “Cloak of secrecy”

Late last week, the government enacted Cameron’s pledge to release COINS spending data, and published the entire contents of the Treasury spending database. This documented where public money comes from, what it is spent on for every financial year from 2005/06 to 2009/10.

It’s a complicated set of data which the government has admitted needs ‘some degree of technical competence’ to make use of. In this vein they’ve asked the Open Knowledge Foundation to help make it ‘more accessible,’ and have also promised ‘more accessible formats’ and user-friendly subsets by August.

The datasets can be downloaded from data.gov.uk, or analysed through the Guardian’s data-explorer.

Making sense of the data

Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor explained how we now need people to make sense of this data and to explore its trends and intricacies:

Now what is needed is people who can make it make sense for the rest of us; we have the transparency but need lenses to bring out the detail.

It’s crucial for citizens to find ways to examine and interpret the data; otherwise it may as well be  – as David Cameron says – “locked away in a vault marked sort of private for the eyes of ministers and officials only”.

We need data.gov.uk/dataset/coins to pass the ‘Mumsy’ test, so citizens can do their own investigations on subjects such as general government spending on consultants, or specified towards a particular agency.

Open data activist David Eaves sums up the challenge going forward:

We need a data-literate citizenry, not just a small elite of hackers and policy wonks. And the best way to cultivate that broad-based literacy is not to release in small or measured quantities, but to flood us with data. To provide thousands of niches that will interest people in learning, playing and working with open data. But more than this we also need to think about cultivating communities where citizens can exchange ideas as well as involve educators to help provide support and increase people’s ability to move up the learning curve.

His call for a data-literate citizenry is one of the reasons we need a massive release of open data, and also an encouragement and incentives for coders to share ideas and skills on how to use and engage with government data (my emphasis):

It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.

[...] But smart governments should not only rely on small groups of developers to make use of open data. Forward-looking governments – those that want an engaged citizenry, a 21st-century workforce and a creative, knowledge-based economy in their jurisdiction – will reach out to universities, colleges and schools and encourage them to get their students using, visualizing, writing about and generally engaging with open data. Not only to help others understand its significance, but to foster a sense of empowerment and sense of opportunity among a generation that could create the public policy hacks that will save lives, make public resources more efficient and effective and make communities more livable and fun.

When we think of libraries, we often just think of a building with books.  But 19th century mattered not only because they had books, but because they offered literacy programs, books clubs, and other resources to help citizens become literate and thus, more engaged and productive. Open data catalogs need to learn the same lesson. While they won’t require the same centralized and costly approach as the 19th century, governments that help foster communities around open data, that encourage their school system to use it as a basis for teaching, and then support their citizens\’ efforts to write and suggest their own public policy ideas will, I suspect, benefit from happier and more engaged citizens, along with better services and stronger economies.

The release of such large amounts of government data represents the beginning of the journey, not the end. The presumption of openness in relation to spending data, represents a sea change in the government’s relationship with the public, and how it wants to structure the debate on government expenditure.

These are small steps, but they’ll only make a big difference if the government utilities these resources as a catalyst towards ensuring citizens can become literate in data, visualization and coding. Ensuring the data is released in open standardised formats (as COINs data has been), allows newspapers and other organisations to create user friendly interfaces to interrogate the data, and will allow for the creation of new apps (check Alpine Interactive’s great visualisation app, and Dharmafly’s Gov expenditure app) and a more data-literate citizenry to emerge.

David Cameron noted how “People will be the masters. Politicians the servants. And that’s the way it should be”. I for one agree, and the release of such data enforces this mantra.

For more check:

• Guardian live-blog on the release of COINs data
• Guardian COINS data-explorer
• Charles Arthur on making sense of COINs data
• COINS data release: The 10 things we found out
• Tech Weekly Podcast with comment from Tom Watson MP on the release of COINs data (25:29 – 34:34)
  
• Francis Maude – Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General – on Opening up government to scrutiny
• COINs analysis appplication (rosslynanalytics)
• COINs on data.gov.uk
• Programme for Goverment (Transparency)