The summit of open data ambition?

The OGP was founded two years ago as ‘a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance’. Member countries – 60 at present – have to sign up to the Open Government Declaration and commit to:

• Increase the availability of information about governmental activities.
• Support civic participation.
• Implement the highest standards of professional integrity throughout our administrations.
• Increase access to new technologies for openness and accountability.

As one of the researchers working on the Institute for Government’s Whitehall Monitor, I’m particularly interested in ‘the availability of information about governmental activities’ – the departments of open data and transparency within the open government agenda. As it hosts this week’s summit, London can make some claim to be the capital city of open data:

• The UK was one of the founding members of the OGP, which it currently chairs.
• The Prime Minister has referred to ‘a complete revolution’ in transparency brought about through data releases and said the UK’s leadership of the OGP will ‘drive a transparency revolution in every corner of the world’.
• The Cabinet Office’s Director of Open Data and Transparency, Paul Maltby, has written about the importance of open data in making government more accountable to citizens, bringing better public services and feeding economic and social growth.
• The UK currently tops the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index ahead of the US and Denmark.

And the progress report compiled by the OGP’s own Independent Reporting Mechanism shows the UK has completed 17 of its 41 open government commitments and is making progress on another 20 of them. (Ironically, the progress report doesn’t publish its data about open data in an open data format.) But delve deeper into the data and the story is more complicated. 21 of the 41 commitments are ahead of or on schedule, meaning that 20 are not. Those commitments that are behind schedule, include ‘examining ways for improving the use of existing published data’. The UK has withdrawn four of its 41 commitments. Two deal with the right to data –independent organisations being able to secure release of public datasets, and a higher cost cap for some Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. Two other FoI commitments (on disincentives for  those withholding data and time limits for public bodies reviewing appeals against FoI refusals) are also behind schedule. Indeed, 76 organisations, worried by the Government’s response to post-legislative scrutiny of the FoI Act, yesterday wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to announce his government ‘will not be bringing forward proposals to restrict the Act’. The Institute for Government has previously published recommendations for improving data on Whitehall – in annex A of our Whitehall Monitor annual report and in our written evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee inquiry into statistics and open data. We have argued that:

• Data should be published in a way that makes it easier to use, access and interpret. We are lucky in the UK that there is a lot of information about central government available (and the government is asking the public whether more should be available). But the key issue is not that more data should be published, but how it is published.
• Key data, such as budgets, spending reviews and departmental accounts, should be published in an open way. At present, these are published in PDF format which is Pretty Damn Frustrating. Publishing in Excel or as a CSV file would give the public access to the raw figures in a way they, and their computers, could use.
• Data should be better documented and figures should be provided on a consistent basis. There are already some good examples of good documentation, like that published alongside OSCAR financial data, that can help users navigate the data.
• If several simple principles were followed, it would make it much easier for people to use the data. These include providing an index of key data and what it covers, naming and labelling files in a consistent way, helping users to find series of data more easily, and collating similar data published by separate organisations in one place to allow comparisons.

We also called for greater transparency in our report, Making Public Service Markets Work. With roughly £1 in every £3 spent by the government on public services going to independent providers, we recommended that the government should oblige all public, voluntary and private sector providers of public services to publish details of the government funding they receive, their performance against contractual obligations, major subcontractors and user satisfaction levels (where available). Given the UK’s progress on open government and open data, we can afford to be a generous host to our global guests. But more can still be done to ensure we are top of the world.