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’.

On October 7-8, 2010, the World Bank hosted an online event featuring live video coverage from the World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings. Thinkers and practitioners were brought together to discuss the opportunities and challenges in three primary areas of focus for the Bank: Open Development Solutions (including the use of open data), Jumpstarting jobs (looking at opportunities for job growth) and Development challenges (what the changing aid landscape means for the global community’s mission to reduce poverty).

One of the interesting discussions from the event focused on the new wave of access to public data, tools and information that is being facilitated by the World Bank and other institutions around the world. Given these new tools and platforms, the question arises as to how we can help empower citizens to use this data to hold governments accountable, and promote collaboration to help solve long-standing development problems.

This question was discussed by a panel of experts including Andrew McLaughlin (Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House), David Eaves (Open Data Blogger and Activist from Canada), Aleem Walji (World Bank Institute Practice Manager for Innovation) and Tariq Khokhar (Technologist at AidInfo).

Some thoughts from the panelists are outlined below:

Andrew McLaughlin on providing a data platform:

Referencing Tim Berners-Lee he says governments should be in the business of providing raw data full stop. Visualizations are a narrative about the data, and citizens are less likely to trust narratives coming from governments. This is not to say Governments should not produce any visualisations – they should at least as a means to express to citizens what it is they are paying for, and to help in assisting policy makers in evidence based policy making. However, extensive illustrations of data is best left to others. Ultimately it’s better for third parties to be driving the analysis, because they can be bias in their interpretation of the data and use it to structure their own stories.

Aleem Walji on harnessing the ideas of others:

The World bank does a good job of collecting, curating and normalizing lots of information. It does not necessarily have to create the best applications with this data. This is best left to those with a story to tell, and who want to develop their own narratives. While the bank will create some visualisations these are primarily to allow our users and internal staff make sense of the data, rather than exploit its full potential. He explains “we cannot imagine what people will do with our data”.

Explaining the Mapping for Results platform he outlines the benefits of geolocation as a means of visualizing data from a different perspective. It’s up to citizens and development practitioners to take our data and draw different conclusions with it. This can then be used to feedback suggestions to the bank:

Our job is to take the data, frame some of the questions and then let other people draw different conclusions, sometimes challenging us.

David Eaves on vehicles for making use of open data, beyond the apps model (my emphasis):

One of the things that excites me the most is not necessarily apps, but what is the analysis/visualisation we are going to do with this data. My hope is that it’ll be a much broader community of people that will push the bank’s thinking; people from constituencies the bank doesn’t normally hear from…The apps are exciting, but lets think much bigger than apps. I think analysis is going to be the really big opportunity with data. Everyone now can be a think tank.

The discussion also includes comments from Tim O’Reilly on the principles of Open Data, along with Robert Zoellick’s  announcement of the World Bank’s Apps for Development competition. This competition aims to bring together the best ideas from technology developers and development practitioners to create innovative applications using World Bank data:

I’m asking you to create applications for new analysis and new ways to solve the world’s long standing problems. This competition challenges you to develop the best software application; whether web-based, mobile, through SMS, smartphone, desktop or tablet, using world bank data.

Transparency and Open data

Aleem Walji explains the essence of what the World bank is trying to do with Open data as:

recognizing that we don’t have a monopoly on knowledge, analytical rigor, research capacity, or publishing. There are many more development economists, statisticians, health experts, education experts, etc. outside the Bank than inside the Bank.

It reminds me of the rather humbling professional addage, “no matter who you work for, there are smarter people who work outside your organisation”. We’ve recognized it and rather than being intimidated by it, we’re inviting others to help us think better, do better, and co-create solutions.

It’s worth nothing the significant efforts by the World bank in terms of Open data and transparency. A recent report from PublishWhatYouFund (a global campaign for Aid transparency) examined 30 major donors across three categories: high level commitment to transparency; transparency to recipient government; and transparency to civil society. The World Bank was the highest performing donor achieving more than double the transparency score (85.4%) of the lowest.

The World bank’s transparency of Aid data, along with their proliferation of Open data, provides a ideal ecosystem in which to grow communities of software developers and development practitioners to create innovation apps and analysis tools. However, Open data should not simply be thought of as a means upon which to create applications. Rather as David Eaves explains, it should be seen as a platform for analysis upon which an individual or organisation can conduct research, and advocate their own evidence based policies. This follows from Zoellick’s idea of democratizing development economics and allows for iThinkTanks to flourish. These iThinkTanks can serve Eric Swanson’s (World Bank Program manager, Development Data Group) agenda as explained below:

Our goal now is to make these data available to everyone to students, to teachers, to reporters, to government officials, to increase understanding and to stimulate the search for innovative ways to accelerate progress and to fight poverty.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick made a fascinating speech last month, in which he urged a sweeping new approach to development economics research. He outlined how the World Bank would change its research model to better tap into the experiences of developing countries.

The new initiative is called “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions,” and aims to make research data and analysis more easily accessible to development practitioners and policymakers.

Development Research

Referencing British philosopher David Hume, who said “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence”, Zoellick questioned whether the set of data and analytic tools now available is sufficient to answer the most pressing questions facing developing countries today:

Too often the positive outcomes of research for policymakers seem to be occasional by products of research rather than its objective from the outset.

Too often research economists seem not to start with the key knowledge gaps facing development practitioners, but rather search for questions they can answer with the industry’s currently favorite tools.

He acknowledged the need for evidence-based best practice – and hand-on experience – to guide the research agenda:

We need to know what works: we need a research agenda that focuses on results. To do so, we will need to gather more evidence and data to assess the effectiveness of development efforts, including aid…

I believe we need a more practical approach —- one that is firmly grounded in the key knowledge gaps for development policy. One that is geared to the needs of policymakers and practitioners — as a primary focus, not as an academic afterthought.One that throws open the doors to all those with hands-on experience.

To this end he suggests economists, policymakers and academics should re-examine the economies of developing countries through more accessible data and use of new technologies.

There is a new opportunity, and certainly a pressing need, for a dynamism in development economics. Software has brought new tools; the Internet has brought new communications; rising economies have brought new experiences.

Open Data, but censorship of conclusions?

The Wall Street Journal and others have highlighted the debate ignited as a result of the speech. Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, said Zoellick’s comments were “generally not only in the right direction, but very useful”.

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik called the speech “forthright and courageous”:

The speech hits all the right notes: the need for economists to demonstrate humility, eschew blueprints, search for differentiated solutions suited to context, learn from the actual policies of successful emerging economies, focus on evaluation but not at the expense of the big questions.

AidInfo (a non-profit concerned with making aid more transparent) also welcomed the speech:

We warmly welcome both the attitude of the World Bank towards democratising data, and the steps they are taking towards it…

Talking to donors over the last year about releasing aid data, it is striking how often they want to know exactly who will use the information and for what purpose…

We are pressing the view that donors should not see themselves as the only, or even the main, providers of information to end users; they should make it possible for other organisations to access information and provide it to people who need it.

Others, however, were more skeptical about the speech. New York University economist William Easterly, formerly of the World Bank, described the comments as “amazingly presumptuous.” He says the current system of economic research, where ideas are picked apart by other economists, works well, but World Bank researchers often make no attempt to publicize their findings, thus hindering the options for debate.

He also notes how research can be subject to censorship, and questions whether this would change with “researchers’ participation in the ‘democraticized’ debate”.

The World Bank’s chief of research, Martin Ravallion, responded saying:

I have never been told what conclusions I should reach, and I doubt very much that anyone told Bill Easterly what conclusions he should reach in his many years working for the Bank’s research department.

Indeed, Ravallion is a prominent supporter of a new kind of research platform to make it easier for anyone to interrogate development data for their own purposes.

World Bank as a Platform

Tim O’ Reilly’s oft discussed Government as a Platform is the central theme of Zoellick’s “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions” initiative. In order to make research more relevant to developing countries, the tools to enable it should be “democratized”, allowing researchers to collaborate with professionals in developing countries.

No longer can the model solely be to research a specific issue and write a paper hoping someone will read it. The new model must be “wholesale” and networked. It must increasingly open information and knowledge to others by giving them the tools to do the economic research themselves.

Martin Ravallion recently blogged about this new “wholesaling model” under which the emphasis switches to producing the tools for others to do the research and providing open access to those tools. He explained three objectives for such an initiative:

1. Empowering Researchers – to do better research to inform development policy and development practice. This changes the focus of the traditional “capacity building” model from the task of “teaching the lessons from past research” to facilitating new learning in specific contexts.
2. Collaborative Retailing model – ensuring World Bank staff and academics in rich countries can work more closely with colleagues in developing countries as full peers.
3. More open and transparent policy analysis – The Bank can play an important role in reducing the costs of understanding even the most sophisticated policy analysis, given that technical capabilities have increased among key stakeholders.

This ‘wholesaling model’, however, is predicated upon the Bank making available online much more of the information it collects on countries to help local researchers and aid workers.

The “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions,” initiative is intended to move this model further by providing a user-friendly data source, free and open to the public. Zoellick explained how this is a fundamental shift from today’s “elite retail” model of research:

This needs to be a fundamentally new way of searching for development solutions, in a networked development architecture, where none dominates and all can play a part

This new research ecosystem is intended to (my emphasis):

Open the treasure chest of the World Bank’s data and knowledge to every village health care worker, every researcher, everyone.

Today, the Bank remains the largest single source of development knowledge. But knowledge must be opened to all…

We need to democratize and demystify development economics, recognizing that we do not have a monopoly on the answers.

We need to throw open the doors, recognizing that others can find and create their own solutions. And this open research revolution is underway…

We need to recognize that development knowledge is no longer the sole province of the researcher, the scholar, or the ivory tower. It’s about the health-care worker in Chiapas recording her results; it’s about the local official posting the school budget on the classroom door so that parents can complain when their children are shortchanged; it’s about the Minister, the academician, the statistician, and the entrepreneur comparing notes on the impact of incentives.

This release of data is already underway with the World Bank’s Open Data initiative. The initiative provides information on more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development indicators. It recently tripled the amount of data on the site and introduced new and improved mapping and visualisation features to improve “data-driven decision making”.

Ravallion explains how this new model should lead to greater transparency and collaboration in the analysis of development data:

This new model for how we do research will combine open access to data with open access to the analytic tools used to inform policy discussions using those data. Our vision is that data, the knowledge and the solutions to development problems will ultimately be generated collaboratively by those who have most to gain from the success of those solutions.

Transparency

Governments, civil society organizations, aid watchdogs have all demanded greater transparency from the World Bank. Government’s around the world have also faced demands for increased openness, and have responded accordingly with open data initiatives and directives. The World Bank has faced such demands and answered these with developments such as:

• Open Data Catalog – similar to the US data.gov and UK data.gov.uk
• New Access to Information Policy – based on the US and Indian Freedom of Information Acts
• Open Forum – running parallel to the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings it will allow a global audience to participate in the event via chat forums, live blogging, Twitter, etc. (similar to the Whitehouse Open For Questions model)

It is also launching an Apps for Development Competition to encourage and identify new, innovative tools and applications using World Bank data. Such app competitions have been run by many government authorities in recent years, and have served to highlight the potential of data for the development of citizen centric web/mobile applications.

The World Bank is following the open data lead set by many governments, and making available online much more of the information it collects on countries. Zoellick understands that researchers and other professionals in the field should be able to examine the data and assumptions behind World Bank reports, and interrogate this information to draw their own conclusions. What the Sunlight Foundation does with Government data, Aidinfo and others should be able to do with World Bank data.

With this speech Zoellick has been described as a Development 2.0 advocate. The overall theme of openness, transparency and collaboration represent a fascinating change in how the World Bank views development data, and its research methodologies on aid effectiveness. Now we just need to ensure the data is of high enough quality, to remove any suggestions the initiative is – like some Government data initiatives – ‘more style than substance’.

Related

• Open Data Helps Developing Countries
• Wholesaling Research for Development
• Full webcast of Zoellick’s speech

Jorg Faust has just released a new paper on political transparency and how this can impact how aid is allocated. The idea is that ‘foreign aid is more effective for development if it’s allocated to relatively poor recipient countries’ with relatively sound political institutions’. However, this is not always the case.

Instead, aid allocation has often diverged from this rule because donor governments and other agents pursue special interest politics (e.g. see proposals from UK Department for International Development that ‘security considerations are placed at the heart of aid projects’).

The paper looks at the ‘variance of aid allocation patterns to different levels of political transparency within donor countries’ and concludes that:

Where political transparency is high, donor governments are more accountable and have less maneuvering space to diverge from technocratic expertise and citizen’s preferences.

It notes how (my emphasis below):

Donor countries with higher levels of political transparency allocate aid more according to recipient countries’ neediness and institutional performance…

Even when controlling for several other potential explanations, political transparency in donor countries has a significant impact on how they allocate their resources for development assistance.

Thus the results of this study underline the argument, that development assistance like other social policies is not a simple altruistic undertaking but a policy field with many vested interests, institutionalized over the past decades. Where political transparency is low, special interest will have a stronger impact on aid policies, which negatively affect a development-oriented distribution of scarce public aid resources. From a policy perspective, the message of this study is a confirmation for those, who request more accountability of donor governments and agencies in international development assistance.

For aid to be effective, it is not only important to have “good” governance on the recipient side. As the empirical evidence in this paper has shown, the quality of political institutions deeply entrenched in donor countries also impacts on the quality of development assistance.

PublishWhatYouFund (a coalition of development organisations campaigning for Global Aid Transparency) concludes that:

From this we can see the power aid transparency can have in increasing aid allocation to where it is needed in recipient countries, and not where it will be politically beneficial for the donor.

The study highlights the power and impact of political transparency, and how this can impact the flow of aid to developing countries. It provides evidence of how higher levels of political transparency can lower levels of corruption, and reduce the impact of special interest groups in policy-making on foreign aid.

Fore more check:

• International Aid Transparency Iinitiative
• AidData
• PublishWhatYouFund
• World Bank: Assessing Aid -What Works, What Doesn’t and Why

(H/T Publish What You Fund)

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)