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Government, Government Data Management, Policy

Open data guru urges govts to let go

By Robin Hicks | 22 June 2010

One of the architects of the Obama Administration’s technology policy has hailed open data as a means to usher in a new era for accountability, collaboration and innovation in the public sector. But he insisted that for open data to live up to its promise, governments must learn to “let go” and embrace a culture of openness and accountability.

“When we talk about open government, we mean that government can no longer operate in a vacuum,” Dr David McClure, Associate Administrator, Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, US General Services Administration, said at a recent event in Singapore. “Social and technological change is pushing government into unchartered waters where it must behave differently.”

To harness the “wisdom of the crowds” from open data, government must get comfortable with the “not invented here” notion - that innovation in the business of governing will increasingly occur beyond the government sphere, said McClure, who was one of the founders of data.gov, an information repository launched in May 2009 to “democratise public sector data”.

Getting government agencies to embrace open data is a big challenge, he said. “We love scorecards in the US government. We use them to create competition and boost transparency – we score agencies on their open government plans.”

However, a risk with scorecards is that open data becomes a compliance activity, McClure noted.

“To avoid that, we score agencies based on how far they are pushing the envelope and taking risks. Open government should not be a one-time only exercise. We want to change the culture of government to one in which openness with the public is an everyday activity. Transparency should be the norm, not the exception.”

Launching a portal and putting lots of data online will not guarantee a flurry of innovation, McClure noted.

“A big issue is data quality. Erroneous or out of date information is not useful. We know that some of the data won’t be perfect, and there will be mistakes. But when mistakes are revealed, we will admit them, correct them and ensure we don’t make the same ones again,” he said.

“We want to offer information that is of high value. This requires thinking on the citizens’ terms. Data should have some context - we should not rely entirely on raw data,” he said.

Officials are being trained to post information in plain, simple language, “so that citizens can understand without being experts in government bureaucracy,” McClure added.

Another challenge is making open data sites accessible and easy to use.

“You need to ensure that citizens find what they’re looking for quickly. To do this, we need to use lightweight, self service-oriented technologies. And we must find ways to push more information into the mobile application space. We need to recognise how the knowledge environment is changing.”

So far, more than 250,000 datasets have been uploaded on data.gov, more than anywhere in the world. The most popular datasets currently are base maps to support emergency response services, and lists of worldwide earthquakes in real-time.

Since data.gov launched a year ago, different versions of data.gov have been launched by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Estonia.

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