How Open is Your Government?

The presentation by Mr. Chris Cruz, the Deputy Director and Deputy State Chief Information Officer of State of California, gave me valuable insights into a number of initiatives of technology utilization in the State of California. Here, I would like to explore more on open data topic.

I totally agree with Mr. Cruz that providing higher government transparency, through publishing open data, brings many benefits to the society. Not only does it increase government accountability and responsiveness, create business and innovation opportunities, but it also improves citizen engagement with public policy. As highlighted in the presentation, California is an advocate of open data. California is at the forefront of this issue, as it is on many other progressive initiatives such as climate change, wildlife conservation, LGBT rights, etc. While there are wide-ranging open-data policies amongst the states and the federal government, living in a liberal state may skew our perception of the progress we have made in this country. For that, it’s helpful to take a step back and look at the US as a whole in terms of data openness.

There are many definitions of open data. One adopted by many organizations states that a dataset is open when anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share the data for any purpose. (http://opendefinition.org/)

In recent years, a handful of non-profit organizations, such as the Web Foundation (WF)¹ and Open Knowledge International (OKI)², have been conducting annual survey to assess the openness of specific government datasets, i.e. data availability, format, license, timeliness and discoverability. An indicator is given to each government under assessment as a result.

Let us take a look at the 2016 Open Data Barometer (ODB) published by WF. A total of 115 governments are assessed on 15 kinds of data. They cover maps, land ownership, census, government budget, government spending, company registry, legislation, public transportation, international trade, health care, education, crime statistics, environmental statistics, national election results and public contracts. The top three ranking governments are U.K., Canada and France in respective order. The US is given a score of 82 with a rank of no. 4, down by 2 ranks from the previous survey. Land ownership data remains unopen. Significant decline in data openness is noted in government budget, census and environmental statistics. Improvement is found in government spending, health care, and crime statistics. Details of the survey can be found at http://opendatabarometer.org/?_year=2016&indicator=ODB.

Top 10 countries in order of ODB

Some key observations worth noting:
– A significant amount of government data is still not available to public globally, and is rarely in an open format. In other cases, the data is open, but it fails to serve the needs of all citizens or it is still of poor quality and unusable.
– Governments are prioritizing innovative data over social policies and public services data.
– The most complete and up-to-date datasets are frequently found on other government ministries or agency websites, instead of the official data portals. This shows a weak coordination between central open data catalogues and different government agencies.
Despite the limitation of the surveys, e.g. datasets selection, timing of the survey, it could be a meaningful indicator for citizens and governments to get into a discourse with one another about the expansion of open data practices.

In my opinion, governments around the world should establish and review their open data laws and regulations. A good open data policy should promote an enduring culture and practice of openness in a way that is resilient to political changes. It should also be driven by user demand, covering economic, social and accountability aspects. A periodic review should be done on the process of publishing government data to ensure the latest data are released centrally, effectively and efficiently in a non-proprietary, machine-readable format, within the constraints of protection of privacy and security. Governments should also ensure that citizens are given a proper channel and a response mechanism to voice their feedback. Governments can also partner with private companies in leveraging the latest technology to improve the national data openness.

It is foreseeable that significant joint effort is required among the central government, local government, agencies and private sector in the world to make useful data truly open. In the case of the US, the leading role served by the State of California hopefully would contribute a cumulative effect on the open data movement in this country.

_________________________________________________________________________________
¹ The Wed Foundation is an independent international organization, which fights for digital equality. Open Data Barometer is one of their researches, harnessing the potential of open data as a tool for tackling social issues and challenges, ensuring people are able to access, understand, and engage with the data that affect them directly.

² Open Knowledge International focuses on realizing open data’s value to society by helping civil society groups access and use data to take action on social issues. Its most prominent project, CKAN, is used by many of the world’s governments (including USA) to host open catalogues of data that their countries possess. The organization conducts an annual Global Open Data Index survey to assess the openness of specific government datasets. In 2016, 15 kinds of data of 94 governments were assessed. The details can be found at https://index.okfn.org/

³ Other references:
How government can promote open data, by McKinsey (http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/how-government-can-promote-open-data)
Government open data: benefits, strategies and use, by the Evans School Review (https://depts.washington.edu/esreview/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2014-Government-Open-Data.pdf)

Users who have LIKED this post:

•