Open Data – Just Do It?

Central Government has established a datastore for Open Data. But if you’re outside of Central Government, how do you react to calls for more online data? And what is the role of FOI Officers in getting them established? Southampton University’s new datastore may give us some clues.

This week Southampton University launched data.southampton.ac.uk, its open data repository. It is perhaps unsurprising that Southampton should take the lead in the Higher Education sector in this way. Two of its academic staff, Professors Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (yes, that one), sit on the Government’s Transparency Board and are heavily involved in the data.gov.uk site.

However, this is the lowest tier of the public sector at which I’ve seen this done. The Greater London Authority (GLA) in London has a Datastore, but the GLA has always been a strange beast – a weird hybrid between local government and central government with more flexibility than most public sector bodies. There may well be others doing great things, but I’m not aware of them. The fact that a higher education institution could do this set me thinking. Was this something I should be doing?

I’ve been hearing great things about the power of open data, but it all seems rather distant from me. The language used can be off-putting at times. All this XML, ODF, even the term ‘Repository’ suggests to me something difficult, technical and, most of all, expensive.

A journalist asked me last week if FOI Officers were involved in Open Data initiatives in the public sector. Being honest (like Superman, FOI Man never lies), I explained that from what I had gathered, where open data initiatives were in place (basically Government and the GLA) the two things seemed to be dealt with separately. FOI Officers were busy dealing with FOI requests and required specific knowledge of the application of legislation. Open Data projects tend to be run by techie-types, statisticians and economists. And it rankled with me that I was being left out of this important stage of the openness agenda.

Why shouldn’t we be involved in these projects? Through answering FOI requests we’ve built up a vast knowledge of the information held in our organisations and how feasible it is to extract and make public. Those of us who are records managers as well have an even deeper knowledge of our organisations’ information resources. Some of us even maintain Information Asset Registers so have already identified all the key datasets in our organisations. No, scratch that. Not only should we be involved, we should be initiating and leading on these projects.

A ‘repository’ is no more than the place where the files are put; it doesn’t have to be something new – unless and until the volume of material is massive, it can just be saved to our Content Management System (CMS) and published to the website that way. The format we publish in is probably less important than just getting it out there, but I have a hunch that the Excel spreadsheets we often send out when asked for data under FOI would be sufficient for most people who wanted to re-use our data. Once we start publishing this data routinely, we’ll presumably get feedback which will tell us which formats we should make data available in in future.

The biggest obstacle is perhaps the legal side of things. Here too though, things are simpler than they were. The National Archives’ new Open Government Licence provides a straightforward way to licence re-use of our data. Assuming the Protection of Freedoms Bill is passed, it will become mandatory for public bodies to adopt such a licence, so why not get ahead of the game?

But surely FOI Officers are there to deal with the requests that come in under the general right of access? Well, we’re also supposed to be maintaining Publication Schemes, pointing to the information our organisations make available pro-actively. And we’ve come under increasing pressure to create and keep up-to-date disclosure logs of the responses we’ve made to FOI requests. The Publication Scheme and Disclosure Log could well be used to structure our datastores.

I may be being terribly naive here, but it seems to me that establishing institutional online datastores outside central government is simpler than we may think. And that FOI Officers ought to be leading the way on them. We already have the tools and the justification for doing these things. Much of it won’t even need additional approval (which if you read We Love Local Government’s amusing, if depressingly familiar, post on Friday, you may appreciate).

I’d love to hear from anyone who has been involved in establishing an Open Data store for their organisation, or has expertise in this area. Am I over-simplifying this? Or perhaps I’m being slow on the uptake (not the most unlikely thing in the world) and everybody else is already well aware how to go about this? Whichever, do please comment on this post – I’m particularly interested to hear your views on Open Data and what we should be doing to make it a reality.