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?