Let your open data have a voice

This is an extract from an internal blog series from the Office of the Chief Digital Officer, ACT Government. It is intended to be thought provoking.

When you publish data and don't provide an ability to interact with it or re-interpret it, you've effectively silenced it. You have taken away its voice and its ability to tell its own story. This is how I see static PDF reports full of tabular data. A song sung for data long gone.

Open data in machine readable format allows the data to speak again. To join with other data to create something new, to be visualised in ways the report author didn't think possible, and be able to contribute to real change by letting in diverse views to think about what the data might mean.

But doesn't that mean that people will be using my data for things other than what I intended it to be used? Yes, and that is the point. De-identified data is an asset for the community, and the community needs to be able to bring their knowledge, experience and specific needs to the analytical table.

Those of you who have worked in the open data space will have had the conversation with the data owner to try to get the data open to the public. More and more I am finding that people are keen to embrace the opening of data and work with us to help data being published. However, there are some challenges that we come across that fit into one (or many) of these areas. Do these excuses sound familiar?

1. It's too hard to make the data in the report into a machine readable format
2. People who use the data could mis-interpret it and come to wrong conclusions
3. The data could have mistakes in it and people would find the mistakes
4. If we provide it in a format that is easy to work with, people may join the data in ways we don't expect and produce a bad outcome

There are more examples, but broadly the issues we see relate to the data owner not seeing there is anything in it for them (other than more work), that the risk of outcomes they cannot control become known (that is, community analysis of the data), and that providing the data in a format that can be used could be encouraging unknown people to try to do bad things (which they could do with the published reports, it would just take longer).

Open data is the cornerstone of open and transparent government. It is a resource that can be used for social good (for example GovHack), research, innovation and commercial opportunities.

So my call to you is, if you are using or producing government data and you are going to publish tables of data in a PDF anyway, remember to keep a machine readable version available to publish online. Give your data life and a voice. #opendata #govhack #hackthecityCBR