The rest can wait. You may even find that joe public do much of the rest for you, post publication.

And the personal details issue needs to be addressed much further back up the chain. What good reason is there for personal data to be in most civil service datasets? Prevention is much better than cure.

I understand that the data may not be 100%, but most of us who want the datasets are quite happy to work with – and around – the imperfections. I certainly don’t want our civil servants to be tasked with cleaning-up the data before publishing it. I’m pretty sure that will be used as an excuse to delay it

I know what you’re saying, and Jeremy’s said much the same too over on Richard’s post. But ‘clean up’ could just involve important but slightly laborious tasks like confirming a dataset doesn’t reveal citizen’s personal data (e.g. names + postcodes, NI numbers or whatever), combining three messy spreadsheets into one, or putting in titles and basic notes so someone coming to the data ‘cold’ understands how it’s structured.

So while I agree that there’s a risk it will be an excuse to delay and needlessly polish, if civil servants start just publishing the content of their hard drives, the ICO and others will justifiably get upset.

What people create for themselves can benefit others and it also harnesses their creativity and energy – being able to “build stuff that matters” (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly). It also can provide a great way for us to find out what different services (don’t just mean our ones!) our residents try and connect to for any given need they have (customer insight!).

We now get people coming to us saying “we just built a microsite with the other local partners to engage on x issue, but we had worked with you, we could have just used your mashup hub”

I know the PoI taskforce produced some really good recommendations for local government, but those are still organisation focused – we need PoI to talk to the people setting the “place shaping” agenda…mind u if Kent & Edinburgh are just getting on with it anyway, maybe that’s not so important?

You explain it well with a practical example.

With Edinburgh we are looking at involving the citizen in the design. There might be an “app” for moving into a new area ; searching for somethingetc…..

The intention is to build an AnywhereCouncil app. set, since the act of moving is the same from John o Groats to Penzance.

This will be a possible UK first, as I don’t remember any government initiative asking the citizen to design their services before. That is why Job Centre Pro Plus may actually work !

We have public servants, but they may not often serve the name in their title.

As far as mashing the data, people are planning for it all to be released in ” as-is ” state, together with early years school and nursery information, including e.g. post-code. Of course, the Ordnance Survey continues to play a 19th century apprach to this. Unlike Denmark or other sensible countries where collaboration is actually encouraged.

Then the coders, and technical folk, together with the citizend, council officials and members can get on with designing what they need for the people who live here.

Public services that add value to the individual

You almost need to think of the apps first and work backwards, though that goes directly against the hacker spirit.

All the questions you mention are interlinked – Which data? Who decides whether to publish? Who benefits? Who pays? For how long?

Given the infinite sets of data across a council or government dept, let alone across all public sector, you would need a diktat to make sure that all publicly available data was released in a re-usable way.

Let’s take a very specific example of the benefits of opening up data to be mashed together. You’ve got a family moving to a new area – father’s been relocated, mother needs to find new job, their 16 yr old kid wants to start an apprenticeship and the three yr old needs some kind of childcare arrangements – oh yeah and throw in good public transport connections and after school activities for the teenager.

There is a lot of work going on around making services adapted to needs of people and place than aligned to departmental processes – just look at Every Child Matters, CAA and MAAs.

If we start opening up data in line with these areas, then service managers (and data owners!) would see it as part of the toolkit to making it easier to achieve specific outcomes they have?

I’m not sure you are necessarily correct about the cleanup requirements associated with publishing data.

I understand that the data may not be 100%, but most of us who want the datasets are quite happy to work with – and around – the imperfections. I certainly don’t want our civil servants to be tasked with cleaning-up the data before publishing it. I’m pretty sure that will be used as an excuse to delay it.

Get it out there warts and all.