Marijn Janssen and Natalie Helbig in Government Information Quarterly: “Many policy-makers are struggling to understand participatory governance in the midst of technological changes. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to have an impact on the ways that policy-makers and citizens engage with each other throughout the policy-making process. A set of developments in the areas of opening government data, advanced analytics, visualization, simulation, and gaming, and ubiquitous citizen access using mobile and personalized applications is shaping the interactions between policy-makers and citizens. Yet the impact of these developments on the policy-makers is unclear. The changing roles and need for new capabilities required from the government are analyzed in this paper using two case studies. Salient new roles for policy-makers are outlined focused on orchestrating the policy-making process. Research directions are identified including understand the behavior of users, aggregating and analyzing content from scattered resources, and the effective use of the new tools. Understanding new policy-makers roles will help to bridge the gap between the potential of tools and technologies and the organizational realities and political contexts. We argue that many examples are available that enable learning from others, in both directions, developed countries experiences are useful for developing countries and experiences from the latter are valuable for the former countries…(More)”
Opening Governance – Change, Continuity and Conceptual Ambiguity
Introduction to special issue of IDS Bulletin by Rosemary McGee and Duncan Edwards: “Open government and open data are new areas of research, advocacy and activism that have entered the governance field alongside the more established areas of transparency and accountability. This article reviews recent scholarship in these areas, pinpointing contributions to more open, transparent, accountable and responsive governance via improved practice, projects and programmes. The authors set the rest of the articles from this IDS Bulletin in the context of the ideas, relationships, processes, behaviours, policy frameworks and aid funding practices of the last five years, and critically discuss questions and weaknesses that limit the effectiveness and impact of this work. Identifying conceptual ambiguity as a key problem, they offer a series of definitions to help overcome the technical and political difficulties this causes. They also identify hype and euphemism, and offer a series of conclusions to help restore meaning and ideological content to work on open government and open data in transparent and accountable governance….(More)”
Open Prescribing
“Every month, the NHS in England publishes anonymised data about the drugs prescribed by GPs. But the raw data files are large and unwieldy, with more than 600 million rows. We’re making it easier for GPs, managers and everyone to explore – supporting safer, more efficient prescribing.
OpenPrescribing is one of a range of projects built by Ben Goldacre and Anna Powell-Smith at the EBM Data Lab to help make complex medical and scientific data more accessible and more impactful in the real world…..
Data sources
Please read our guide to using the data.
Prescribing data is from the monthly files published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre(HSCIC), used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.
Practice list sizes are from the NHS Business Service Authority’s Information Portal, used under the terms of the Open Government Licence. ASTRO-PU and STAR-PUs are calculated from list sizes, based on standard formulas.
BNF codes and names are also from the NHS Business Service Authority’s Information Portal, used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.
CCG to practice relations, and practice prescribing settings, are from the HSCIC’s data downloads(epraccur.csv), used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.
CCG names and codes and CCG geographic boundaries are from the Office for National Statistics, used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.
Practice locations are approximate, geocoded using OpenCageData. If you know a better source of practice locations (not including Code-Point Open), please get in touch!…(More)”
A Taxonomy of Open Government Data Research Areas and Topics
Paper by Yannis Charalabidis, Charalampos Alexopoulos & Euripidis Loukis in the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce: “The opening of government data, in order to have both social and economic value generated from them, has attracted the attention and interest of both researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, such as information systems, management sciences, political and social sciences, and law. Despite the rapid growth of this multidisciplinary research domain, which has led to the emergence and continuous evolution of technologies and management approaches for open government data (OGD), a detailed analysis of the specific areas and topics of this research is still missing. In this paper, a detailed taxonomy of research areas and corresponding research topics of the OGD domain is presented: it includes four main research areas (ODG management & policies, infrastructures, interoperability and usage & value), which are further analysed into 35 research topics. An important advantage of this taxonomy, beyond its high level of detail, is that it has been developed through extraction and combination of relevant knowledge from three different kinds of sources: important relevant government policy documents, research literature, and experts. For each of the 35 research topics we have identified, its research literature is summarized and main research objectives and directions are highlighted. Based on the above taxonomy, an extension of the extant OGD lifecycle is advanced; also, under-researched topics that require further research are identified….(More)”
50 states, 50 public records stories
Kelly Hinchcliffe at Poynter: “I try to feature journalists who are telling important stories using public records. For my final column of 2015, I wanted to do something big and decided to find public records stories from all 50 states (plus, a bonus: Washington, D.C.).
This is not meant to be a “best of” list. It’s simply a collection of public records stories from the past year that intrigued me. I found many of the stories by searching the National Freedom of Information Coalition’s website, as well as Investigative Reporters & Editors.…check out my list of public records stories from around the country and see what records journalists are requesting. It’s full of great story ideas:
Alabama
Auburn spent $1.67 million on Outback Bowl trip
(Montgomery Advertiser)
Auburn spent more than $1.6 million on its Outback Bowl trip, according to the Institutional Bowl Expense report summary submitted to the NCAA and released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Alaska
KMXT sues Kodiak City for documents in police brutality case
(KMXT)
The public radio station filed suit against the City of Kodiak to get records from police after three officers handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a man with autism.
Arizona
Legislature redacts, delays and denies access to messages
(Arizona Capitol Times)
The newspaper requested electronic messages sent among top state elected officials of both parties and their top staff. But getting access to those messages was difficult.
Arkansas
Some question email deletion policies
(Arkansas News)
After the state treasurer’s office instituted a policy requiring employees to delete all emails after 30 days, critics questioned whether it was necessary and whether it was consistent with the spirit of open government.
California
Collapsed I-10 bridge given an A rating just last year
(The Desert Sun)
After a bridge collapsed on Interstate 10, the newspaper reviewed Federal Highway Administration data and found that the bridge had been given an “A” rating and one of the highest possible flood safety ratings.
Colorado
Students accuse CU-Boulder of delaying release of debate documents
(Daily Camera)
University of Colorado students accused administrators of dragging their feet on an open records request the students filed to get letters, emails and documents related to the Republican presidential debate held on campus….(More)”
What Citizens Can Teach Civil Servants About Open Government
Maria Hermosilla, and Beth Noveck in Governing: “An open government is one that is transparent, participatory and collaborative. But moving from traditional government operating behind closed doors to more open institutions, where civil servants work together with citizens to create policies and solve problems, demands new skills and sensibilities.
As more and more American public-sector leaders embrace the concept of openness as a positive force for governmental effectiveness, they would do well to look toward Brazil’s largest city, where an unusual experiment was just launched: an effort to use a variation on crowdsourcing to retrain Sao Paulo’s 150,000 civil servants. It’s described as the world’s largest open-government training program.
The program, known as Agents of Open Government – part of a wider city initiative called “Sao Paulo Aberta” (Open Sao Paulo) — aims to teach through peer-to-peer learning, where government employees learn from citizens. Twenty-four citizen-led courses that began last month are aimed not only at government employees and elected community representatives but also at social activists and the general population.
Sao Paolo is betting on the radical notion that learning can happen outside of formal civil-service training colleges. This initiative reflects a growing global trend toward recognizing that institutions can become smarter — more effective and efficient — by making use of the skills and experience of those outside of government.
Officials hope to have 25,000 participants over the course of the coming year. To encourage public employees’ participation, city workers who attend the courses gain credits in the municipal evaluation system that allow them to get pay raises….(More)”
Opening up government data for public benefit
Keiran Hardy at the Mandarin (Australia): “…This post explains the open data movement and considers the benefits and risks of releasing government data as open data. It then outlines the steps taken by the Labor and Liberal governments in accordance with this trend. It argues that the Prime Minister’stask, while admirably intentioned, is likely to prove difficult due to ongoing challenges surrounding the requirements of privacy law and a public service culture that remains reluctant to release government data into the public domain….
A key purpose of releasing government data is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of services delivered by the government. For example, data on crops, weather and geography might be analysed to improve current approaches to farming and industry, or data on hospital admissions might be analysed alongside demographic and census data to improve the efficiency of health services in areas of need. It has been estimated that such innovation based on open data could benefit the Australian economy by up to $16 billion per year.
Another core benefit is that the open data movement is making gains in transparency and accountability, as a greater proportion of government decisions and operations are being shared with the public. These democratic values are made clear in the OGP’s Open Government Declaration, which aims to make governments ‘more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens’.
Open data can also improve democratic participation by allowing citizens to contribute to policy innovation. Events like GovHack, an annual Australian competition in which government, industry and the general public collaborate to find new uses for open government data, epitomise a growing trend towards service delivery informed by user input. The winner of the “Best Policy Insights Hack” at GovHack 2015 developed a software program for analysing which suburbs are best placed for rooftop solar investment.
At the same time, the release of government data poses significant risks to the privacy of Australian citizens. Much of the open data currently available is spatial (geographic or satellite) data, which is relatively unproblematic to post online as it poses minimal privacy risks. However, for the full benefits of open data to be gained, these kinds of data need to be supplemented with information on welfare payments, hospital admission rates and other potentially sensitive areas which could drive policy innovation.
Policy data in these areas would be de-identified — that is, all names, addresses and other obvious identifying information would be removed so that only aggregate or statistical data remains. However, debates continue as to the reliability of de-identification techniques, as there have been prominent examples of individuals being re-identified by cross-referencing datasets….
With regard to open data, a culture resistant to releasing government informationappears to be driven by several similar factors, including:
- A generational preference amongst public service management for maintaining secrecy of information, whereas younger generations expect that data should be made freely available;
- Concerns about the quality or accuracy of information being released;
- Fear that mistakes or misconduct on behalf of government employees might be exposed;
- Limited understanding of the benefits that can be gained from open data; and
- A lack of leadership to help drive the open data movement.
If open data policies have a similar effect on public service culture as FOI legislation, it may be that open data policies in fact hinder transparency by having a chilling effect on government decision-making for fear of what might be exposed….
These legal and cultural hurdles will pose ongoing challenges for the Turnbull government in seeking to release greater amounts of government data as open data….(More)
Open Data Index 2015
Open Knowledge: “….This year’s Index showed impressive gains from non-OECD countries with Taiwan topping the Index and Colombia and Uruguay breaking into the top ten at four and seven respectively. Overall, the Index evaluated 122 places and 1586 datasets and determined that only 9%, or 156 datasets, were both technically and legally open.
The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of data in thirteen key categories, including government spending, election results, procurement, and pollution levels. Over the summer, we held a public consultation, which saw contributions from individuals within the open data community as well as from key civil society organisations across an array of sectors. As a result of this consultation, we expanded the 2015 Index to include public procurement data, water quality data, land ownership data and weather data; we also decided to removed transport timetables due to the difficulties faced when comparing transport system data globally.
Open Knowledge International began to systematically track the release of open data by national governments in 2013 with the objective of measuring if governments were releasing the key datasets of high social and democratic value as open data. That enables us to better understand the current state of play and in turn work with civil society actors to address the gaps in data release. Over the course of the last three years, the Global Open Data Index has become more than just a benchmark – we noticed that governments began to use the Index as a reference to inform their open data priorities and civil society actors began to use the Index advocacy tool to encourage governments to improve their performance in releasing key datasets.
Furthermore, indices such as the Global Open Data Index are not without their challenges. The Index measures the technical and legal openness of datasets deemed to be of critical democratic and social value – it does not measure the openness of a given government. It should be clear that the release of a few key datasets is not a sufficient measure of the openness of a government. The blurring of lines between open data and open government is nothing new and has been hotly debated by civil society groups and transparency organisations since the sharp rise in popularity of open data policies over the last decade. …Index at http://index.okfn.org/”
Freedom of Information, Right to Access Information, Open Data: Who is at the Table?
Elizabeth Shepherd in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs: “Many national governments have adopted the idea of the ‘right to access information’ (RTI) or ‘freedom of information’ (FOI) as an essential element of the rights of citizens to freedom of opinion and expression, human rights, trust in public discourse and transparent, accountable and open government. Over 100 countries worldwide have introduced access to information legislation: 50+ in Europe; a dozen in Africa; 20 in the Americas and Caribbean; more than 15 in Asia and the Pacific; and two in the Middle East (Banisar, 2014). This article will provide an overview of access to information legislation and focus on the UK Freedom of Information Act 2000 as a case example. It will discuss the impact of the UK FOI Act on public authorities, with particular attention to records management implications, drawing on research undertaken by University College London. In the final section, it will reflect on relationships between access to information and open government data. If governments are moving to more openness, what implications might this have for those charged with implementing FOI and RTI policies, including for records management professionals?…(More)”
Assessing the Evidence: The Effectiveness and Impact of Public Governance-Oriented Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives
Paper by Brandon Brockmyer and Jonathan A. Fox: “Transnational multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) – voluntary partnerships between governments, civil society, and the private sector – are an increasingly prevalent strategy for promoting government responsiveness and accountability to citizens. While most transnational MSIs involve using voluntary standards to encourage socially and environmentally responsible private sector behavior, a handful of these initiatives – the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST), the Open Government Partnership (OGP), the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) and the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) – focus on information disclosure and participation in the public sector. Unlike private sector MSIs, which attempt to supplement weak government capacity to enforce basic social and environmental standards through partnerships between businesses and civil society, public sector MSIs ultimately seek to bolster public governance. But how exactly are these MSIs supposed to work? And how much has actually been achieved?
The purpose of this study is to identify and consolidate the current state of the evidence for public governance-oriented MSI effectiveness and impact. Researchers collected over 300 documents and interviewed more than two-dozen MSI stakeholders about their experiences with five public governance oriented multi-stakeholder initiatives.
This report provides a ‘snapshot’ of the evidence related to these five MSIs, and suggests that the process of leveraging transparency and participation through these initiatives for broader accountability gains remains uncertain. The report highlights the ongoing process of defining MSI success and impact, and how these initiatives intersect with other accountability actors and processes in complex ways. The study closes with key recommendations for MSI stakeholders….(More)”