data

Guidance for councils on publishing data

LG Group Transparency Programme

The LG Group have today launched a feedback site to get views on the draft guidance that has been developed for councils on the based ways to approach publishing open data.

As the site says:

Many authorities already publish considerable data. The challenge now is to be systematic about this, and to adopt some basic digital approaches in making data public to maximise everyone’s ability to benefit.

The Local Government Group in collaboration with the Local Public Data Panel is publishing a set of guides to offer practical help to meet both immediate targets of publishing data, and to adopt approaches that will add most value for local people and public services over the longer term.

This is a rapidly evolving and innovative agenda, so the guides are not static, mandatory requirements but rather they are ‘live’ documents that are open for you to comment on and offer the benefits of your experience.

The live nature of the documents is down to the fact that they are hosted on Steph Gray‘s marvellous Read+Comment setup which allows for the rapid publication of commentable documents.

As well as being commentable the site also publishes all the content in open reusable formats through RSS – a great example of walking the talk.

As I discussed with Tim on the podcast, it’s vital to increase the levels of data literacy at all levels of government – explaining the whys and the wherefores as well as the techie stuff about licenses and formats. This guidance is a great start, and if folk across the open local government scene get involved and add the benefit of their knowledge and experience through this site, it should be even better.

It’s also an opportunity, of course, for councils to have their say on this whole agenda. Open data is no panacea and, approached in the wrong way, it could have profound negative implications. So even if you are yet to drink the open data Kool-Aid, get stuck in now or forever hold your peace.

Filling the opendata gaps

Hadley Beeman has posted about a great little project idea:

…there’s a gap between the government opendata vision and the reality. The datasets are often released full of unintelligible codes, information that the developers outside government (building apps and visualisations) would love to have. This makes sense to me: I’ve seen budget codes, cost centre codes, programme codes in my various government roles… I can imagine that analysis would be complicated if you didn’t have a legend or translations for them…

…The first thing we need is a tool to crowdsource metadata about government data. This should allow those who know something about the data (civil servants, local government officers, etc.) to easily mark it in such a way that everyone can see and use their knowledge.

Essentially, we will be adding to the datasets as they come out of government, so that everyone who wants to use them will have better data to work with.

It’s fair to say that I know nothing about opendata, other than that it is probably a good thing and that the more context that can be added to it, the better. It seems like Hadley’s project is a sound one and one that if it succeeds will brings a great deal of benefit both to government and to citizens – via our friends, the civil hackers.

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