Michael Cross: setting data free is an easy promise when in opposition – so would a Tory government do it?
Michael Cross, co-founder of this campaign, has an article at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site on the Conservative pledges on data made on Thursday by David Cameron. Of note:
The three-year-old Free Our Data campaign – founded by myself and the Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur – will welcome Cameron’s re-stated promise to publish every item of government spending over £25,000 and raw data to allow communities to build their own crime maps and councils’ performance data in a standard format.
We will cheer most loudly at the plan to create a new right to data and proactively to identify the 20 most useful data sets on public services and make them available for web mash-ups.
But, he points out, there are warnings to be heeded.
To judge by Cameron’s speech, which makes no mention of the government’s single largest data business [Ordnance Survey], the Conservatives share this aversion to reform. The suspicion must be that the Tory solution is to try and sell off the mapping agency lock stock and barrel. Yet locational information is an essential component of nearly every public data set. To commercialise its supply would be to move in the very opposite direction of setting our data free.
It certainly is important for the Conservatives to set out clearly what their intention is with regard to OS before the election. A manifesto commitment not to sell it off would be a good idea.
Read the whole article for the wider points. Steven Feldman likes it – and adds
My one question is if the treasury are unable or unwilling to go down the centrally funded route what would you prefer – privatisation or trying to get the best out of the current model. I know which one I would choose.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Advance notice: Mike Cross talking to BCS on April 2 in London (19 March 2008; score: 39.31%)
- Who's who after the reshuffle (12 July 2007; score: 29.96%)
- Is the new Statistics Board the right model for free data? (18 January 2007; score: 26.17%)
- In today's Guardian: what the new OPSI rules mean (and don't mean) (6 April 2006; score: 25.18%)
- Where we are today: chasing half a dozen ministers who won't take responsibility (12 October 2006; score: 24.95%)
June 27th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
On doing vs not doing a french member of the governement just told in an interview a lot about what will happen to data in France:
http://guerby.org/blog/index.php/2009/06/27/202-datagov-vs-datagouv
June 28th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
It would be a mistake to think that the only use for public sector information is to make web pretty, but otherwise useless mashups.
To be of any use, epecially to industry, public sector information has to be released in a standard non-proprietry file format that that can be downloaded from a public server and imported into specialist software for its analysis, visualisation and interpretation. For example, mapping and other geographic information as shape files for import into a geographic information system.
June 28th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
A small point of information first – the ’shapefile’ format is wrongly stated above to be non-proprietary – it’s not, though it is in wide usage.
Like any data anywhere, if it’s to be made public (published) in some form then it needs to use open standards and even better, the data about the data (aka metadata) needs to made freely accessible first and must include whatever rights, constraints, licencing, sources, methods etc. Without metadata there is no transparency, no means for validation or challenge once the actual data has been used; on the one hand metadata allows potential users to review suitability before investing time, effort and even money while on the other it provides the a self-enforcing regulatory capacity for users and their peers and opponents.
As far as the speech goes, don’t actually think it healthy to link the implausible (think PFI/PPP contracts) £25k idea with the data accessibility idea, especially when it can’t be ‘raw’ for reasons of processing, aggregation, anonymisation and such. However, agree that there is so much data across all parts of government (beyond the ones that have been the focus thus far); they are nearly all way behind in terms of ‘publishing’, i.e. delivering access to, data or metadata. The devil will be in the (metadata) detail, if and when the 100,000 public bodies get around to dealing with it…
Not sure government of any hue as the stomach for another round of privatisation any time soon or for taking Trading Funds back into vote funding. The spectre of the former (for OS) predates ‘free our data’ (since 1999 at least) and has hung mostly uncommented over the debate, so while I agree with MC that there is no question that such a move would be terrible for UK plc in the medium-long term, the time seems ripe for the various actors to forge a future collaboratively based on ‘getting the best out of the current [trading fund] model’.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Merci, Laurent Рtres int̩ressant