New Public Sector Transparency Board and Public Data Transparency Principles

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-t...) 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.

Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information
24 August 2010

it is good to set out principles, as others have commented there will be a need for detailed guidance.

as a starting point, in the spirit of access to data, please can we be told the salaries of those appointed to the Transparency Board, how many days per week they will be spending on this, whether they are now civil servants and if not where they are counted in official figures, as well as details of the fair and open competitive advertising which took place to appoint these people.

Please can we have copies of all those offering tender bids or applying for the posts, and details of the process used to decide whom to appoint.

Please can we have greater clarity on what will be cut in order to provide the additional access proposed - nothing is free, certainly not data provision nor government websites!

The principles do not address the fundamental issues of what the public sector is...

+ Does it includes statutary advisors (EG NDPBs)?
+ What about NGOs delivering government business in the big society?
+ Parish Councils?

Should we use an exisiting definition such as that in the EIRs?

Finally not all public sector organisations are Crown organisations so the Data.gov.uk licence can't be used by them as it is a crown licence.

The fourth principle could be misinterpreted to imply one and only one access point. Surely not what is intended? There must be room for more specialised places that have more detailed and more specialised metadata related to particular domains (e.g. health, statistics, etc.). Perhaps the word "single" is not needed - we do need a place where everything can be found, but is surely should not be the only place.

I assume then the government owned OS mastermap will be one of the data sets freely made available for reuse very soon.

This site aims at data reuse by technical people but the public ask for data in a readable form (in Local Government). Some may be able to understand how to use Excel (csv) but other will need in PDF format. The standard should be to be able to convert into many forms and not just dictate.
Secondly much of our data is locked away in older systems that do not allow extracts without additional development costs or a resource to do this manually - something we do not have as budgets are cut. Something to bear in mind please!

As a UK tax payer I fully accept that data collected at public expense should be made available for re-use, and free of extraneous licence conditions or fees. However as a UK PSI employee I do not see why UK assets should be free to use by non-UK based organisations in business which do not benefit UK citizens.

My question to the Board is this: In light of the UKs fiscal situation, why aren't we utilising these incredibly valuable assets to maximise UK licensing revenues based on intended use. Intended use UK = FOC / Intended use anywhere else = Licence fee?

Just a minor point, but if you had put named HTML anchors alongside each principle, it would have been easier for commentators on third party sites to post links that point directly back to specific principles allowing you to more easily capture comments appearing on remote sites, and enabling the automated archiving of pointwise micro-discussion on things like Twitter?

What is the relationship between this new site, and the existing Information Asset Register at
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/iar/index

Will the IAR initiative be shut down under the recent Cabinet Office initiative on web site costs?
(http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2010/100624-websi...)

What resources will Central Govenment make available to its departments, agencies and non-departmental public bodies to create and maintain the inventories of data holdings (metadata, last data principle). Many of the IAR records look pretty unloved and uncared for i.e. out of date. Creating and maintaining metadata is itself a time-consuming task if its results are to be of any use.

Thanks for providing this comment box which one can use in privacy without having to remember anything or get involved with any strange rituals eg " logging in/ registering".
Long may comment boxes like this one serve parts of the public which otherwise might not be reached at all.

But with reference to;

"Public Data" is the objective, factual, non-personal data on which public services run and are assessed, and on which policy decisions are based, or which is collected or generated in the course of public service delivery."

One wonders if all our notes and comments, submitted to public and government services in the spirit of voluntarism albeit from the privacy of wherever we happen to be may also be treated as "public data". I hope so.