I would have thought that was pretty obvious.
If you are aggregating data then you’re producing some kind of .gov.au channel.

Have you heard of adsense?

Why couldn’t we have a .gov.au sense?

It’s not a like there aren’t the pennies wasted constantly on supporting private media owners. http://www.finance.gov.au/advertising/index.html

For several years I was responsible for the coordination of some of the state data for this report. It seemed to me at the time that the measures in the Report were so hampered by inter-state and agency wrangling, over-stuffed committees and with so many compromises of content, measures and data access, quality and transparency and then over-generalization, that much of the content is largely meaningless in terms of providing meaningful measures of performance. In most areas the Report is a measure of inputs, not of outcomes. (Not to mention the question of whteher we can have much trust in the data itself, as a number of very high profile Ombusdsman Inquiries in Victoria have revealed).

Further, the underlying data is never released. Yet for 14 years we have been satisfied for this to continue, with extraordinary resources going into the preparation of a Report almost no-one reads.

Freer access to data would allows quality researchers, citizens and commercial enterprises to ask and answer questions that matter to them. Until we free up data access (and this can be done while still managing privacy, cost, discoverability, standards etc) then we Australians can never be productively engaged in our democracy, and will remain placid and passive recipients of whatever spin the government decides to feed us. In my view, the government is not evil, they need our help to lead them and to demonstrate our voice as knowledge enabled citizens.

Creating, collecting, and preserving data costs … add to this the complexity of government IT systems and where there are legacy systems involved, getting the data out can incur substantial costs. At the very least there are time and resource costs. And because of prior policy decisions around outsourcing there are also now often third party fees payable to outsourced IT service providers.

I’d also like to add that the complexity of intra-and inter-agency redundancies produced by the silos inherent in these complex bureaucracies also incurs a substantial cost.

I’ve just finished an 18 month engagement with a government department where even in one directorate their IT systems for their programs of work would normally all be funded and therefore built and maintained independently. I revolutionised the area by cutting across the silos through leveraging greater interoperability between program ‘modules’ supported by a single core base system. This approach saved a lot of money.

I know people tend to fret when it comes to government departments sharing what citizens fear is sensitive data, but people don’t realise the cost to the public of working this way.

M

Many of the costs related to data are due to inefficiencies in the collection, storage and analysis systems.

Much of the public value derived from the distribution and use of data is not in the direct value in selling the data, but in the economic value of its use.

Government needs to invest and focus its efforts in redeveloping the systems used to collect, store, manage and analyse data.

And it needs to revalue data based on the economic value to the community rather than based on cost-recovery for collection and distribution.

Yvonne makes a valid point about emergecny organisations having to pay for data that may be life critical. The other side of the coin is that if the data is given away, and there is no chnage to the funding model, then the quality of the data will suffer and this will also be potentially very dangerous.

Other comments relate to ‘just make the data available’, and while the objective is supported there are other issues to consider if we wish to ensure that the information is going to provide real value to the community. One of the first issues is discovery of the informaiton – it may be available but not easily located, especially by people not part of the community of interest that the data is relevant to – secondary level users may not know what agency holds the data. once fouind, the data needs to be accessible and in the right form to be of use. In the past many geographic informaiton systems had proprietory formats and while there is an improvement, it is not always possible to read or use data from a web site due to format and other issues.

To establish mechanisms to improve access to PSI a number of processes must be put in place. these include:
identification of the data custodian and the authoritative source
metadata to describe the data or information of interest to determine fitness for use.
new funding models to ensure continuance of data collection and data management of significant data sets.
Appropriate policies and guidelines in relaiton to genuine national security and privacy type issues
determinationof relevant standards for data discovery and access and also to enhance the usability of the data.

As I have mentioned in previous discussions, the government spatial commuinity has addressed (mostly sucessfully) many of these issues and has a governance and administrative framework, a policy, tools and other capabilities to make data easily available. We should build on this existing experience and capability.

Finally, most agencies are not funded to make all their data available via their web site. They cannot for security reasons enable the web site to connect to their backend databases.

All these issues can be resolved, but this will require a fundamental shift in relation to funding and a strong policy framework to ensure that the philosphical shift is adhered to.

However, this does not apply to “resellers” and repackaging of government information. A good model is a royalty model where the government gets a percentage of the income generated by the resellers. It is difficult to set a price for most information but you can set a price for reliability, authenticity, access, ease of use etc. Also it is not necessary to set a price for all users as it simply results in “churn”. For example, it is not worth collecting money from another government agency for its use of the data nor is it necessary to charge charitable or government supported agencies.

There are other situations where there is a quid pro quo that need not involve money. For example a government organisation may hold some information and allow users to correct and add to the information in return for using the information. In other words the wiki concept can be used not only for access but for collection and gathering of information.

Money collected is not the only way to evaluate the success or otherwise of information dispersal. Other methods are accesses, reuses of information, money collected by reusers, reduction in costs and time from use of data. All of these can be collected or estimated if they are considered when designing the access systems. They can then “automatically” supply evaluations in real time.

Probably most government information can be collected automatically and distributed automatically if we design the system appropriately. For example, I am about to pay my rates and taxes. As these get paid I see no reason why I could not be told how many others have paid and the percentage still to go. I would also be interested in seeing the total of bad debts per suburb. When I go to pay my water and sewerage bill I would like to see the average consumption of water per person for each suburb and the percentages paying and not paying not only in my city but across the nation. The reason I would like to see this is to be assured that others are doing their bit. Making such information available might seem petty and trivial but the fact that it is there and we can verify it means that we build social capital. It also means that discrepancies in delivery of services across the nation becomes publicly visible.

In other words instead of having to wait for someone to do a survey or conduct a study we can with modern technology monitor society in “real time” and not only see problem areas but see how we go at fixing those problems as we introduce programs to fix difficulties.

One of the keys to building efficient organisations is to make routine good practices and to highlight discrepancies in outputs when they become apparent.

For example there is no reason with electronic cash registers and inventory systems available in all stores for my purchases to be automatically sent to me and for me to then give those items to a government or commercial agency who can then publish aggregate figures in real time of actual purchases made of different items across the country.

There is no reason why I couldn’t send the results of my latest blood tests automatically and anonymously but with personal characteristics to the Bureau of Stats and they to allow me to see how I compare “in real time” to my cohorts.

What I am trying to say here is that we should not just think about what we are doing at the moment but we should take the opportunity of imagining what can happen when there is a free flow of information and think of ways of making the collecting of information part of other activities that we do routinely.

Think how this could work for income tax. Instead of filling out a tax return once a year why can’t I send all the relevant bits of information to the tax office (or some private agency) everytime a transaction involving tax occurs and the tax is automatically calculated and paid. This would save my employer having to take the tax out of my salary and then me having to reconcile everything at the end of the year. It would also stop things like the overpayment of dependent benefits etc. It is my guess that allowing tax payers to optin to such a system would be very popular. As a side benefit each tax payer (and the government) could see in real time how the rest of the country was going in terms of their paying their taxes and get very good statistics on employment in “real time”.

The message is that making information flow freely in both directions will lead to interesting outcomes that will almost always work towards more efficient operation of society.

Can a government or public institution recoup costs through ads? I think there would be less tolerance for this amongst users than on corporate information search sites.