Inaugural Consultation Meeting

Working Group Facilitator Reports

10 July 2013, Wood Quay Venue, Dublin www.ogpireland.ie @ogpconsultirl

Working Group Facilitators

• Transparency – Nat O’Connor, TASC

• Accountability – Imelda Higgins BL

• Citizen Participation – Ivan Cooper, The Wheel

• Technology & Innovation – John Handelaar, KildareStreet.com

Transparency- Challenges

• Culture change needed in the public service

• People need to see the value of this information to them

• Cost will be presented as a barrier

• Limitations in existing IT systems

• Lack of filtering tools to get at data

• Current ‘user-unfriendly’ language and presentation of data, online mess

Transparency - Solutions

• A ‘one-stop-shop’ approach– Data portal; Directory of existing data and formats;

Thematic categories; Filtering tools

• Central set of good practice standards– Responsive data formats; Data release schedules;

Immediacy of data; Common ICT across public bodies

• Consult journalists/expert data users

• Provide local data and graphics

• Run competitions to source innovation in the use of public information from citizens

Accountability - Challenges

• Identifying standards

• Engaging public

• Improving financial oversight

• Identifying outcomes

• Assigning responsibility

– Over centralisation of power

• Enforcement

Accountability - Solutions

• International commitments/best practice

• Aarhus Convention

• Consolidation

• Public consultation on standard setting

• Wide AND Deep AND Facilitative

• EU citizens’ initiative

• Improved appointment process (merit based)

Accountability – Solutions cont

• Improved accountability mechanism

– Decentralisation

– Accountability institutions

– Improved access to enforcement records

– Reduced legal costs

Technology and Innovation

Problem Solutions

Others have more and better data before we even get started

Bring baseline of data published up to UK OGP phase 1 (key spatial data, budgets and spending to be linked, etc)

Innovators and companies have no awareness of open data, and those which do are at the mercy of government providers

• Somehow evangelise the possibilities• Create central repositories• Hold providers to quality and service

levels

Public sector data owners usually have no idea what we’re talking about when we mention open data, and little idea what the point of it might be.Several govt actors consider all this to be Cost, not Potential Savings or Potential Revenue

• Evangelise benefits (savings and efficiencies)

• Find existing “Pain Points” which can be solved by open approaches and share solutions

• Share ‘best practice’ examples because few exist currently

Technology and Innovation

Problem Solutions

Local government particularly is divided 34 ways and data is spotty at best

Gov.ie should specify a minimumcollection of common data sets and prescribe formats and frequency of publication

Government actors have mostly no idea what data they even have; majority of existing data sets are in closed (eg PDF) or otherwise suboptimal formats

• ‘Asset register’ project• Data.gov.ie / Local.data.gov.ie to list all

sets whether currently published or not. Initially at least metadata for all sets to be included as a to-do list

Data release in reusable formats is already government policy but it’s not happening

• Gov.ie should pin enforcement of release on a named person or agency

• Someone needs to be able to enforce and if necessary penalise offenders

• Govt could ban purchase of new web sites which don’t have data channels