These slides are meant as a resource for people to see a bit of information about the state of open government and data in Australia at the moment. It intentionally has a lot of words and is not my usual style for slides, but hopefully this makes it more useful for people given the rapid pace I speak at :)

1. Open Government: State of the Nation
January 2014
Pia Waugh
Open Source|Data|Government Geek
@piawaugh

2. Why?
Government:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Single most influential factor in your life
Huge influence on tech and tech sector
Exists to serve the public good
Answerable to citizens
Many ways to engage – politics and policy
Is rapidly adapting to new landscape

3. What?
“Government”:
•
Executive
•
Legislative
•
Administrative
Many aspects affect and support you:
•
Legislation
•
Policies and programs
•
Public services and infrastructure
•
Gov directly and indirectly shapes the market

4. Exciting times
The future is here, and it is widely distributed
l
l
l
l
l
Publishing
Communications
Monitoring
Enforcement
Property
Every traditional pillar of power and control now
in the hands of anyone online and tech literate.

5. Open Government?
Traditionally:
•
•
•
Freedom of Information – public accountability
Public reporting – budget papers, annual reports
Anti-corruption & whistleblowing protections
Extended by technology – “Gov 2.0”:
•
•
•
Shared and open data: publishing, analysis
Participatory government: policy development
Citizen-centric services: “Tell Us Once”

6. Government Landscape in Australia
(latest version online)
Open Government in Australia
Comparatively good
Recent developments:
•
Gov 2.0 Taskforce (2009)
•

7. The APS Policy Landscape
Others:
•
Publishing Public Sector Information & National Standards Framework
•
Open Public Sector Information: From Principles to Practice Report
•
Declaration of Open Government
•
Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report
•
Statement of IP Principles for Government (CC-BY)
•
Ahead of the Game
•
Digital Transition Policy & Accessibility Policy
•
Emerging Open Research Policies
•
Open Government Partnership (TBD)

8. State and Territory Policies

9. Policy Components
Services and data heavy – focused on an effective, efficient public service
that facilitates innovation and economic growth.
APS:
• Digital government and support for citizens to self service
• Permissive copyright – CC-BY as the default
• Open by default
• Support reuse and innovation
• More public engagement
• Better use of data for government policy and services
States/Territories add:
• Procurement – open by design
• Reporting – dashboards
• Departmental strategies

10. Shared and open
data
Participatory
government
Citizen centric
services

11. Open by Design
Government as an API as basic premise
Building “open” (eg, proactive publishing, reporting) into:
l Systems
l Processes
l Procurement
l Planning
l Records management
l Publishing
Leveraging all government data through:
• Public APIs (specialist or generic)
• Analysis tools and datavis
• Internal processes looking for external sources
• No wrong door through federated search

12. New and Old Skills Required
Publishing and Automation
•
Project management, reporting
•
Metadata/linked data
•
API developmaent and serving
•
Plumbing between systems
•
Data and info visualisation
•
Analysis and statistics
•
Policy development
•
Public consultation and engagement
•
Online community management
•

13. Some Challenges
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Legislative
{Open|Big|Linked}
Culture
Data
Systems
Low tolerance for mistakes
Reactive vs proactive
Metadata/semantic context
Too much data
Real time vs historic
Definitions and common references
Limited skills and over specialisation

14. data.gov.au
Free, cloud based, highly scalable platform for hosting government data.
Staged approach
1.Publishing (2013)
l
l
l
Improving the functionality and ease of
publishing for agencies with training and
documentation
2.Value realisation (Early 2014)
l
l
Providing useful front end tools for data.gov.au
including data visualisation and analysis tools
3.Data quality (Late 2014)
l
l
l
Looking at ways to provide agencies the ability
to accept iterative data improvements in a
verifiable way
Features
Good metadata, categorisation,
•
tagging
• Federated search making data
•
and data services easier to find
• Manual and automated publishing
•
options
• API access to government data
• Easy to publish, download and
•
interact with data online
• Basic data visualisation capability

15. Benefits to Community in Opening Data
Transparency
Visibility to government spending, projects, effectiveness, etc
Increases incentive to follow evidence based approach
Builds trust in government services and information
Participatory Democracy
Enables greater participation in planning and decision making
More informed public → better decision making
Improvements to data → better policy and decisions
Innovation
New opportunities and innovation in industry, research, civil society
Economic
Creates opportunities for industry to value-add to government data

16. Benefits to Government in Opening Data
Cuts red tape
More efficient to share data across government and with public
Proactive automated publishing
Improves Government Operations
Enables collaboration and consistency across gov and with public
Improves policy analysis, development, implementation, reporting
Government as an API improves service delivery:
enables thematic personalised approach to info & mobile services
Improves data quality through verifiable public contributions
Improved opportunities for evidence based and iterative policy
Innovation
Enables government to tap into public and private innovation
Starts to change the culture of what “innovation” means & costs
Enables greater capacity for public contributions to public policy

17. Privacy and confidentiality
•
•
•
•
Custom API approach to confidentialise on fly (eg, ABS)
Deidentification of data – to appropriate level
Aggregation
Leveraging existing processes for researcher (unit level)
access rather than conflating open data discussions
• Privacy Commissioner as point of reference and support
• Avoiding common identifiers across multiple datasets
Loads of Tools Available
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Publishing tools – CKAN, Socrata, bespoke
Automation – FME, Kettle, python
Data visualisation – Tableau, SuperDataHub, SpatialKey, HTML5
Analysis – R, domain specialist software, thematic and contextual
API development
Application development
Linked data tools
Metadata tools including inferred context

18. Our Greatest Opportunity
Hacker Culture in Australia

19. GovHack
Develop strong links between government,
research, community and industry
Showcase uses of government data and
clever technical community in Australia
Encourage publishing of government data
Make “innovation” meaningful
July 11 – 13 2014

20. All the pieces are in place,
we need people to put the puzzle together

21. Things are changing quickly.
Stars are well aligned.
We have the technology.
What better place than here?
What better time than now? -- RATM
Questions?