Paper by Peter Conradie and Dr. Sunil Choenni in Government Information Quarterly: “Due to expected benefits such as citizen participation and innovation, the release of Public Sector Information as open data is getting increased attention on various levels of government. However, currently data release by governments is still novel and there is little experience and knowledge thus far about its benefits, costs and barriers. This is compounded by a lack of understanding about how internal processes influence data release. Our aim in this paper is to get a better understanding of these processes and how they influence data release, i.e., to find determinants for the release of public sector information. For this purpose, we conducted workshops, interviews, questionnaires, desk research and practice based cases in the education program of our university, involving six local public sector organizations. We find that the way data is stored, the way data is obtained and the way data is used by a department are crucial indicators for open data release. We conclude with the lessons learned based on our research findings. These findings are: we should take a nuanced approach towards data release, avoid releasing data for its own sake, and take small incremental steps to explore data release.”
Open Government Data Gains Global Momentum
Wyatt Kash in Information Week: “Governments across the globe are deepening their strategic commitments and working more closely to make government data openly available for public use, according to public and private sector leaders who met this week at the inaugural Open Government Data Forum in Abu Dhabi, hosted by the United Nations and the United Arab Emirates, April 28-29.
Data experts from Europe, the Middle East, the US, Canada, Korea, and the World Bank highlighted how one country after another has set into motion initiatives to expand the release of government data and broaden its use. Those efforts are gaining traction due to multinational organizations, such as the Open Government Partnership, the Open Data Institute, The World Bank, and the UN’s e-government division, that are trying to share practices and standardize open data tools.
In the latest example, the French government announced April 24 that it is joining the Open Government Partnership, a group of 64 countries working jointly to make their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. The announcement caps a string of policy shifts, which began with the formal release of France’s Open Data Strategy in May 2011 and which parallel similar moves by the US.
The strategy committed France to providing “free access and reuse of public data… using machine-readable formats and open standards,” said Romain Lacombe, head of innovation for the French prime minister’s open government task force, Etalab. The French government is taking steps to end the practice of selling datasets, such as civil and case-law data, and is making them freely reusable. France launched a public data portal, Data.gouv.fr, in December 2011 and joined a G8 initiative to engage with open data innovators worldwide.
For South Korea, open data is not just about achieving greater transparency and efficiency, but is seen as digital fuel for a nation that by 2020 expects to achieve “ambient intelligence… when all humans and things are connected together,” said Dr. YoungSun Lee, who heads South Korea’s National Information Society Agency.
He foresees open data leading to a shift in the ways government will function: from an era of e-government, where information is delivered to citizens, to one where predictive analysis will foster a “creative government,” in which “government provides customized services for each individual.”
The open data movement is also propelling innovative programs in the United Arab Emirates. “The role of open data in directing economic and social decisions pertaining to investments… is of paramount importance” to the UAE, said Dr. Ali M. Al Khouri, director general of the Emirates Identity Authority. It also plays a key role in building public trust and fighting corruption, he said….”
LEG/EX – Legislative Explorer
LEG/EX: Legislative Explorer:Data Driven Discovery: “A one of a kind interactive visualization that allows anyone to explore actual patterns of lawmaking in Congress.
Get the ‘big picture’
Compare the bills and resolutions introduced by Senators and Representatives and follow their progress from the beginning to the end of a two year Congress.
Dive deeper
Filter by topic, type of legislation, chamber, party, member, or even search for a specific bill.
Want to learn more about the legislative process?
The Legislative Process from the Library of Congress
Who’s your Representative or Senator?
LegSim — a student run simulation for government courses”
Passage Of The DATA Act Is A Major Advance In Government Transparency
OpEd by Hudson Hollister in Forbes: “Even as the debate over official secrecy grows on Capitol Hill, basic information about our government’s spending remains hidden in plain sight.
Information that is technically public — federal finance, awards, and expenditures — is effectively locked within a disconnected disclosure system that relies on outdated paper-based technology. Budgets, grants, contracts, and disbursements are reported manually and separately, using forms and spreadsheets. Researchers seeking insights into federal spending must invest time and resources crafting data sets out of these documents. Without common data standards across all government spending, analyses of cross-agency spending trends require endless conversions of apples to oranges.
For a nation whose tech industry leads the world, there is no reason to allow this antiquated system to persist.
That’s why we’re excited to welcome Thursday’s unanimous Senate approval of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act — known as the DATA Act.
The DATA Act will mandate government-wide standards for federal spending data. It will also require agencies to publish this information online, fully searchable and open to everyone.
Watchdogs and transparency advocates from across the political spectrum have endorsed the DATA Act because all Americans will benefit from clear, accessible information about how their tax dollars are being spent.
It is darkly appropriate that the only organized opposition to this bill took place behind closed doors. In January, Senate sponsors Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rob Portman (R-OH) rejected amendments offered privately by the White House Office of Management and Budget. These nonpublic proposals would have gutted the DATA Act’s key data standards requirement. But Warner and Portman went public with their opposition, and Republicans and Democrats agreed to keep a strong standards mandate.
We now await swift action by the House of Representatives to pass this bill and put it on the President’s desk.
The tech industry is already delivering the technology and expertise that will use federal spending data, once it is open and standardized, to solve problems.
If the DATA Act is fully enforced, citizens will be able to track government spending on a particular contractor or from a particular program, payment by payment. Agencies will be able to deploy sophisticated Big Data analytics to illuminate, and eliminate, waste and fraud. And states and universities will be able to automate their complex federal grant reporting tasks, freeing up more tax dollars for their intended use. Our industry can perform these tasks — as soon as we get the data.
Chairman Earl Devaney’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board proved this is possible. Starting in 2009, the Recovery Board applied data standards to track stimulus spending. Our members’ software used that data to help inspectors general prevent and recover over $100 million in spending on suspicious grantees and contractors. The DATA Act applies that approach across the whole of government spending.
Congress is now poised to pass this landmark legislative mandate to transform spending from disconnected documents into open data. Next , the executive branch must implement that mandate.
So our Coalition’s work continues. We will press the Treasury Department and the White House to adopt robust, durable, and nonproprietary data standards for federal spending.
And we won’t stop with spending transparency. The American people deserve access to open data across all areas of government activity — financial regulatory reporting, legislative actions, judicial filings, and much more….”
The Open Data 500: Putting Research Into Action
TheGovLab Blog: “On April 8, the GovLab made two significant announcements. At an open data event in Washington, DC, I was pleased to announce the official launch of the Open Data 500, our study of 500 companies that use open government data as a key business resource. We also announced that the GovLab is now planning a series of Open Data Roundtables to bring together government agencies with the businesses that use their data – and that five federal agencies have agreed to participate. Video of the event, which was hosted by the Center for Data Innovation, is available here.
The Open Data 500, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is the first comprehensive study of U.S.-based companies that rely on open government data. Our website at OpenData500.com includes searchable, sortable information on 500 of these companies. Our data about them comes from responses to a survey we’ve sent to all the companies (190 have responded) and what we’ve been able to learn from research using public information. Anyone can now explore this website, read about specific companies or groups of companies, or download our data to analyze it. The website features an interactive tool on the home page, the Open Data Compass, that shows the connections between government agencies and different categories of companies visually.
We began work on the Open Data 500 study last fall with three goals. First, we wanted to collect information that will ultimately help calculate the economic value of open data – an important question for policymakers and others. Second, we wanted to present examples of open data companies to inspire others to use this important government resource in new ways. And third – and perhaps most important – we’ve hoped that our work will be a first step in creating a dialogue between the government agencies that provide open data and the companies that use it.
That dialogue is critically important to make government open data more accessible and useful. While open government data is a huge potential resource, and federal agencies are working to make it more available, it’s too often trapped in legacy systems that make the data difficult to find and to use. To solve this problem, we plan to connect agencies to their clients in the business community and help them work together to find and liberate the most valuable datasets.
We now plan to convene and facilitate a series of Open Data Roundtables – a new approach to bringing businesses and government agencies together. In these Roundtables, which will be informed by the Open Data 500 study, companies and the agencies that provide their data will come together in structured, results-oriented meetings that we will facilitate. We hope to help figure out what can be done to make the most valuable datasets more available and usable quickly.
We’ve been gratified by the immediate positive response to our plan from several federal agencies. The Department of Commerce has committed to help plan and participate in the first of our Roundtables, now being scheduled for May. By the time we announced our launch on April 8, the Departments of Labor, Transportation, and Treasury had also signed up. And at the end of the launch event, the Deputy Chief Information Officer of the USDA publicly committed her agency to participate as well…”
Benchmarking open government: An open data perspective
Paper by N Veljković, S Bogdanović-Dinić, and L Stoimenov in Government Information Quarterly: “This paper presents a benchmark proposal for the Open Government and its application from the open data perspective using data available on the U.S. government’s open data portal (data.gov). The benchmark is developed over the adopted Open Government conceptual model, which describes Open Government through data openness, transparency, participation and collaboration. Resulting in two measures, that is, one known as the e-government openness index (eGovOI) and the other Maturity, the benchmark indicates the progress of government over time, the efficiency of recognizing and implementing new concepts and the willingness of the government to recognize and embrace innovative ideas.”
How government can promote open data
Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, and Kate Jackson from McKinsey: “Institutions and companies across the public and private sectors have begun to release and share vast amounts of information in recent years, and the trend is only accelerating. Yet while some information is easily accessible, some is still trapped in paper records. Data may be free or come at a cost. And there are tremendous differences in reuse and redistribution rights. In short, there are degrees when it comes to just how “open” data is and, as a result, how much value it can create.
While businesses and other private organizations can make more information public, we believe that government has a critical role in unleashing the economic potential of open data. A recent McKinsey report, Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information,1 identified more than $3 trillion in economic value globally that could be generated each year in seven domains through increasingly “liquid” information that is machine readable, accessible to a broad audience at little or no cost, and capable of being shared and distributed. These sources of value include new or increased revenue, savings, and economic surplus that flow from the insights provided by data as diverse as census demographics, crop reports, and information on product recalls.
Sitting at the nexus of key stakeholders—citizens, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—government is ideally positioned to extract value from open data and to help others do the same. We believe government can spur value creation at all levels of society by concurrently fulfilling four important open-data roles (exhibit):
Government can serve as an open-data provider, catalyst, user, and policy maker to create value and mitigate risks.
Public interest labs to test open governance solutions
Kathleen Hickey in GCN: “The Governance Lab at New York University (GovLab) and the MacArthur Foundation Research Network have formed a new network, Open Governance, to study how to enhance collaboration and decision-making in the public interest.
The MacArthur Foundation provided a three-year grant of $5 million for the project; Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, also contributed. Google.org’s technology will be used to develop platforms to solve problems more openly and to run agile, real-world experiments with governments and NGOs to discover ways to enhance decision-making in the public interest, according to the GovLab announcement.
Network members include 12 experts in computer science, political science, policy informatics, social psychology and philosophy, law, and communications. This group is supported by an advisory network of academics, technologists, and current and former government officials. The network will assess existing government programs and experiment with ways to improve decision-making at the local, national and international government levels.
The Network’s efforts focus on three areas that members say have the potential to make governance more effective and legitimate: getting expertise in, pushing data out and distributing responsibility.
Through smarter governance, they say, institutions can seek input from lay and expert citizens via expert networking, crowdsourcing or challenges. With open data governance, institutions can publish machine-readable data so that citizens can easily analyze and use this information to detect and solve problems. And by shared governance, institutions can help citizens develop solutions through participatory budgeting, peer production or digital commons.
“Recognizing that we cannot solve today’s challenges with yesterday’s tools, this interdisciplinary group will bring fresh thinking to questions about how our governing institutions operate and how they can develop better ways to help address seemingly intractable social problems for the common good,” said MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci.
GovLab’s mission is to study and launch “experimental, technology-enabled solutions that advance a collaborative, networked approach to re-invent existing institutions and processes of governance to improve people’s lives.” Earlier this year GovLab released a preview of its Open Data 500 study of 500 companies using open government data as a key business resource.”
Open Data: What Is It and Why Should You Care?
Jason Shueh at Government Technology: “Though the debate about open data in government is an evolving one, it is indisputably here to stay — it can be heard in both houses of Congress, in state legislatures, and in city halls around the nation.
Already, 39 states and 46 localities provide data sets to data.gov, the federal government’s online open data repository. And 30 jurisdictions, including the federal government, have taken the additional step of institutionalizing their practices in formal open data policies.
Though the term “open data” is spoken of frequently — and has been since President Obama took office in 2009 — what it is and why it’s important isn’t always clear. That’s understandable, perhaps, given that open data lacks a unified definition.
“People tend to conflate it with big data,” said Emily Shaw, the national policy manager at the Sunlight Foundation, “and I think it’s useful to think about how it’s different from big data in the sense that open data is the idea that public information should be accessible to the public online.”
Shaw said the foundation, a Washington, D.C., non-profit advocacy group promoting open and transparent government, believes the term open data can be applied to a variety of information created or collected by public entities. Among the benefits of open data are improved measurement of policies, better government efficiency, deeper analytical insights, greater citizen participation, and a boost to local companies by way of products and services that use government data (think civic apps and software programs).
“The way I personally think of open data,” Shaw said, “is that it is a manifestation of the idea of open government.”
What Makes Data Open
For governments hoping to adopt open data in policy and in practice, simply making data available to the public isn’t enough to make that data useful. Open data, though straightforward in principle, requires a specific approach based on the agency or organization releasing it, the kind of data being released and, perhaps most importantly, its targeted audience.
According to the foundation’s California Open Data Handbook, published in collaboration with Stewards of Change Institute, a national group supporting innovation in human services, data must first be both “technically open” and “legally open.” The guide defines the terms in this way:
Technically open: [data] available in a machine-readable standard format, which means it can be retrieved and meaningfully processed by a computer application
Legally open: [data] explicitly licensed in a way that permits commercial and non-commercial use and re-use without restrictions.
Technically open means that data is easily accessible to its intended audience. If the intended users are developers and programmers, Shaw said, the data should be presented within an application programming interface (API); if it’s intended for researchers in academia, data might be structured in a bulk download; and if it’s aimed at the average citizen, data should be available without requiring software purchases.
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4 Steps to Open Data
Creating open data isn’t without its complexities. There are many tasks that need to happen before an open data project ever begins. A full endorsement from leadership is paramount. Adding the project into the work flow is another. And allaying fears and misunderstandings is expected with any government project.
After the basic table stakes are placed, the handbook prescribes four steps: choosing a set of data, attaching an open license, making it available through a proper format and ensuring the data is discoverable.
1. Choose a Data Set
Choosing a data set can appear daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Shaw said ample resources are available from the foundation and others on how to get started with this — see our list of open data resources for more information. In the case of selecting a data set, or sets, she referred to the foundation’s recently updated guidelines that urge identifying data sets based on goals and the demand from citizen feedback.
2. Attach an Open License
Open licenses dispel ambiguity and encourage use. However, they need to be proactive, and this means users should not be forced to request the information in order to use it — a common symptom of data accessed through the Freedom of Information Act. Tips for reference can be found at Opendefinition.org, a site that has a list of examples and links to open licenses that meet the definition of open use.
3. Format the Data to Your Audience
As previously stated, Shaw recommends tailoring the format of data to the audience, with the ideal being that data is packaged in formats that can be digested by all users: developers, civic hackers, department staff, researchers and citizens. This could mean it’s put into APIs, spreadsheet docs, text and zip files, FTP servers and torrent networking systems (a way to download files from different sources). The file type and the system for download all depends on the audience.
“Part of learning about what formats government should offer data in is to engage with the prospective users,” Shaw said.
4. Make it Discoverable
If open data is strewn across multiple download links and wedged into various nooks and crannies of a website, it probably won’t be found. Shaw recommends a centralized hub that acts as a one-stop shop for all open data downloads. In many jurisdictions, these Web pages and websites have been called “portals;” they are the online repositories for a jurisdiction’s open data publishing.
“It is important for thinking about how people can become aware of what their governments hold. If the government doesn’t make it easy for people to know what kinds of data is publicly available on the website, it doesn’t matter what format it’s in,” Shaw said. She pointed to public participation — a recurring theme in open data development — to incorporate into the process to improve accessibility.
Examples of portals, can be found in numerous cities across the U.S., such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Sacramento, Calif.
Visit page 2 of our story for open data resources, and page 3 for open data file formats.
Infomediary Business Models for Connecting Open Data Providers and Users
Paper by Marijn Janssen and Anneke Zuiderwijk in Social Science Computer Review: “Many public organizations are opening their data to the general public and embracing social media in order to stimulate innovation. These developments have resulted in the rise of new, infomediary business models, positioned between open data providers and users. Yet the variation among types of infomediary business models is little understood. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the diversity of existing infomediary business models that are driven by open data and social media. Cases presenting different modes of open data utilization in the Netherlands are investigated and compared. Six types of business models are identified: single-purpose apps, interactive apps, information aggregators, comparison models, open data repositories, and service platforms. The investigated cases differ in their levels of access to raw data and in how much they stimulate dialogue between different stakeholders involved in open data publication and use. Apps often are easy to use and provide predefined views on data, whereas service platforms provide comprehensive functionality but are more difficult to use. In the various business models, social media is sometimes used for rating and discussion purposes, but it is rarely used for stimulating dialogue or as input to policy making. Hybrid business models were identified in which both public and private organizations contribute to value creation. Distinguishing between different types of open data users was found to be critical in explaining different business models.”