At the meeting of APPSI on 22 July 2010, members heard a presentation by The National Archives staff on the Transparency Agenda. It was subsequently agreed that APPSI should express some views to the consultation now underway on the Public Data Transparency Principles and work programme. This note provides those views:
• APPSI has long argued that the government requires a strategy to prioritise information garnering rather than relying entirely on serendipitous data harvesting of what is readily available. We understand that there is no strategy in place to prioritise datasets for incorporation in data.gov.uk. We regard this as wasteful and unlikely to deliver the maximum benefit in the short or medium term.
• We welcome the Public Data Transparency Principles. But government’s working definition of ‘public data’ contradicts the ethos of the Principles in that it does not address the issue of public good. The existing definition is almost entirely predicated upon the management and policy needs of government. It also makes clear that the data are those created as a by-product of public service delivery. Taken at face value, all this is a reversion to the Rayner Review of the 1980s. Given the Public Data Principles, the Prime Minister’s letter to departments of 31 May 2010 (see: http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/statements-and-articles/2010/05/letter-to-government-departments-on-opening-up-data-51204) and existing and putative legislation, we suspect this phrasing is an oversight and urge that government should reconsider this definition. A version more in tune with the Principles would be: ‘Public data’ are the objective, factual, non-personal data collected by government at all levels to meet policy, service delivery and public accountability purposes, to enhance the capacity of individuals to be active citizens and to facilitate innovation.
• The first Public Data Principle: Public data policy and practice will be clearly driven by the public and businesses who want and use the data, including what data is released when and in what formats can not be met without effective consultation with users – current and latent. Such consultation is difficult – as the long experience in the official statistics world makes clear. Without it however success will only be by luck. We understand that the Transparency Board will consider user representation. We urge a more purposeful and planned engagement with the user community rather than simply providing data in the hope that this will meet needs.
• In order for government to make data freely available it is important that the public task, which generates the information, is clearly defined. We are pleased to hear that this matter is under active discussion and look forward to seeing the results.
• APPSI’s members from the devolved administrations pointed out that the Transparency Agenda is very Whitehall-centric and more needs to be done to establish a relationship with those administrations.
• One member commented that, based on his experience, data.gov.uk is very confusing as the data is available in formats that can’t easily be re-used and metadata is very limited in explaining the characteristics (hence reliability) of the data. He recognised that this might be transitory given the early stage of development of the web site. Has there been any investigation of the usability of the web site and the active use of the data therein?
• It was agreed amongst APPSI members that measuring the economic and social value of data.gov.uk would be difficult, not least because of the shift of policy outcomes emphasis between administrations. Given the significance of the whole workstream, the expenditure of public funds and the strong political support, APPSI members nevertheless believe it would be responsible for a benchmark to be established now so that changes wrought by data.gov.uk could be assessed effectively at some stage (e.g. in three year’s time).
• In addition, APPSI members debated the trade-offs between continuing to publish data in existing, internationally-defined standards specific to a discipline and re-engineering them into the more universal form underpinning data.gov.uk. We concluded that the relative merits of these might be case-specific, that the resources required for any re-engineering were not clear to us and that indeed both approaches might end up running in parallel.
