Open Government: State of the NationJanuary 2014
Pia WaughOpen Source|Data|Government Geek@piawaugh
Why?Government:
Single most influential factor in your life
Huge influence on tech and tech sector
Exists to serve the public good
Answerable to citizens
Many ways to engage politics and policy
Is rapidly adapting to new landscape
What?Government:Executive
Legislative
Administrative
Many aspects affect and support you:Legislation
Policies and programs
Public services and infrastructure
Gov directly and indirectly shapes the market
Exciting timesThe future is here, and it is widely distributed
Publishing
Communications
Monitoring
Enforcement
Property
Every traditional pillar of power and control nowin the hands of anyone online and tech literate.
Open Government?Traditionally:
Freedom of Information public accountability
Public reporting budget papers, annual reports
Anti-corruption & whistleblowing protections
Extended by technology Gov 2.0:
Shared and open data: publishing, analysis
Participatory government: policy development
Citizen-centric services: Tell Us Once
Open Government in AustraliaComparatively good
Recent developments:Gov 2.0 Taskforce (2009)
Government Landscape in Australia (latest version online)
The APS Policy Landscape
Others: Publishing Public Sector Information & National Standards Framework
Open Public Sector Information: From Principles to Practice Report
Declaration of Open Government
Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report
Statement of IP Principles for Government (CC-BY)
Ahead of the Game
Digital Transition Policy & Accessibility Policy
Emerging Open Research Policies
Open Government Partnership (TBD)
State and Territory Policies
Policy ComponentsServices and data heavy focused on an effective, efficient public service that facilitates innovation and economic growth.
APS: Digital government and support for citizens to self service
Permissive copyright CC-BY as the default
Open by default
Support reuse and innovation
More public engagement
Better use of data for government policy and services
States/Territories add: Procurement open by design
Reporting dashboards
Departmental strategies
ParticipatorygovernmentCitizen centricservicesShared and opendata
Open by DesignGovernment as an API as basic premise
Building open (eg, proactive publishing, reporting) into:Systems
Processes
Procurement
Planning
Records management
Publishing
Leveraging all government data through:Public APIs (specialist or generic)
Analysis tools and datavis
Internal processes looking for external sources
No wrong door through federated search
New and Old Skills Required Publishing and Automation
Project management, reporting
Metadata/linked data
API developmaent and serving
Plumbing between systems
Data and info visualisation
Analysis and statistics
Policy development
Public consultation and engagement
Online community management
Some Challenges Legislative
Culture
Systems
Low tolerance for mistakes
Reactive vs proactive
Metadata/semantic context
Too much data
Real time vs historic
Definitions and common references
Limited skills and over specialisation
{Open|Big|Linked}Data
data.gov.auFree, cloud based, highly scalable platform for hosting government data.
Staged approachPublishing (2013)
Improving the functionality and ease of
publishing for agencies with training and
documentation
Value realisation (Early 2014)Providing useful front end tools for data.gov.au
including data visualisation and analysis tools
Data quality (Late 2014)Looking at ways to provide agencies the ability
to accept iterative data improvements in a
verifiable way
Features Good metadata, categorisation, tagging
Federated search making data
and data services easier to find
Manual and automated publishing
options
API access to government data
Easy to publish, download and
interact with data online
Basic data visualisation capability
Benefits to Community in Opening DataTransparency Visibility to government spending, projects, effectiveness, etc Increases incentive to follow evidence based approach Builds trust in government services and information
Participatory Democracy Enables greater participation in planning and decision making More informed public better decision making Improvements to data better policy and decisions
Innovation New opportunities and innovation in industry, research, civil society Economic Creates opportunities for industry to value-add to government data
Benefits to Government in Opening Data
Cuts red tape More efficient to share data across government and with public Proactive automated publishing
Improves Government Operations Enables collaboration and consistency across gov and with public Improves policy analysis, development, implementation, reporting Government as an API improves service delivery: enables thematic personalised approach to info & mobile services Improves data quality through verifiable public contributions Improved opportunities for evidence based and iterative policy
Innovation Enables government to tap into public and private innovation Starts to change the culture of what innovation means & costs Enables greater capacity for public contributions to public policy
Privacy and confidentiality Custom API approach to confidentialise on fly (eg, ABS)
Deidentification of data to appropriate level
Aggregation
Leveraging existing processes for researcher (unit level)
access rather than conflating open data discussions
Privacy Commissioner as point of reference and support
Avoiding common identifiers across multiple datasets
Loads of Tools AvailablePublishing tools CKAN, Socrata, bespoke
Automation FME, Kettle, python
Data visualisation Tableau, SuperDataHub, SpatialKey, HTML5
Analysis R, domain specialist software, thematic and contextual
API development
Application development
Linked data tools
Metadata tools including inferred context
Our Greatest OpportunityHacker Culture in Australia
GovHack
July 11 13 2014Develop strong links between government, research, community and industry
Showcase uses of government data andclever technical community in Australia
Encourage publishing of government data
Make innovation meaningful
All the pieces are in place,we need people to put the puzzle together
Things are changing quickly.
Stars are well aligned.
We have the technology.
What better place than here? What better time than now? -- RATM
Questions?