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January 07, 2010
Opening the London DataStore
I am going to be chairing today's CES Government London event at London's Living Room on top of City Hall, with a live link up with CES in Las Vegas. The event has attracted top level political support with Mayor Boris Johnson introducing it and Sir Simon Milton announcing the details of the GLA's London Datastore, through which a huge quantity of data held by the GLA and its functional bodies will be released later this month. They will be followed by speakers from the Office for Public Sector Information, 4IP, Guardian, Metropolitan Police, London Olympics, NASA and New York City. So, this is a significant day: but why is significant and how did we get here?
It is significant because policies towards information are changing after a long period of stability dating back to the 1980s. During this period the principle governing the availability of information collected by the government was dominated by a principle that Mrs Thatcher first articulated i.e. 'user pays'. This principle had its origins in a period of recession and public spending restraint: Mrs Thatcher's argument was that general taxation should not pay for a specific government service of use to an individual or company. If they wanted it... they should pay for it. Successive governments have held fast to this policy as to change it meant spending increases. During the last decade a whole infrastructure has built up around this policy, so for example we now have the shareholder executive looking after the government's interest in largely autonomous agencies that are charging citizens for various government services. So, when there are agencies like the Ordnance Survey (OS) who are covering their costs by charging citizens and businesses for services, why should government change anything?
The reason that we are now seeing major shifts in policy is that government has been hit by a perfect storm, with waves of change coming from different directions, which together is compelling change.
The first wave comes from the so-called "Digital Transition" in which most forms of information and entertainment are being digitised. These new digital goods have different economic properties, notably, they have low marginal costs of distribution after the first copy. In commercial markets producers have sought ways of spreading the costs of this first copy over all subsequent purchasers so that they recover the costs and make a profit by using copyright and copy protection technology, with only limited success. However, when the government collects information for a core public duty, taxation does and should pay for the first copy of the information. After that, if government charges for the collected information, we must call it a tax when the marginal costs of distribution are low or zero. Hence the longstanding opposition to the 'user pays' funding model for the Ordnance Survey as one part of government needs to pay another part for the use of mapping data, and citizens and businesses need to pay commercial rates even though government needs maps to discharge its public duties. The Royal Mail also needs postcodes to undertake mail delivery logistics, therefore, the sale of postcode information is a tax. There is now a broad alliance of opposition to this model led by the Guardian's Free Our Data campaign on the grounds that it is irrational, unfair and ineffective. This campaign believes that opening up data will lead to new commercial activity, which will be taxed, thus bringing benefit back to government and society.
The second wave of change comes from the mobile internet revolution that has swept through communications over the last decade and created a hyperconnected society in which instant, anywhere access to information is the norm. With the huge success of smartphones and app stores people now have the platform in their hand for the delivery of information services that would have been impossible only a few years ago. This new reality has changed expectations amongst the public... so, for example, people now expect to be able check train times in real time on their mobile device. Here too there have been disputes: when an authority like National Rail Enquiries (NRE) (private, but publically funded) can offer a feed of train schedule and running information, who should have access to this? A complaint to the Office of Rail Regulation that NRE's decision to licence the data to just one provider in 2009 led to the recommendation that a code of practice be established for the licensing of this information. Lying in the background, however, is the bigger question of why when billions are spent on railways by the public they should have to buy back information about publicly funded services at all. This is very complex as the information is free on the mobile web... but the question still remains: should a publicly funded authority be able to determine which business models for the distribution of public information are to be acceptable? In the new future I think the public will expect diversity and choice, and therefore that the data should be openly available for developers in public and voluntary sectors to reuse and innovate.
The third wave comes from the open source movement whose beliefs derive ultimately from principles of freedom, self help and an opposition to monopoly. The opendata movement believes that government should collect, structure and validate its information and then put it on a server in raw form for anyone to use. This unleashes innovation and engagement with the information being analysed and presented in new ways. OpenStreetMap (OSM) are the classic expression of this wave of change: now with over 200,000 members worldwide OSM have remapped developed countries where the cost of the GPS technology to do it has fallen dramatically recently. In the developing world OSM have been able to engage in community partnerships like that in Kibera, Kenya to map previously poorly mapped locations. OSM's scale has now led to major national scale donations of mapping information e.g. in Austria, which will now be maintained by open source groups. The open source movement has thrown down the gauntlet to governments on data by saying effectively... if you don't gather the data then we will do it ourselves using crowdsourcing techniques. The fact that this puts pressure on existing government 'user pays' charging regimes is another wave of change.
So, todays London DataStore announcements by the GLA and last months "Smarter Government" initiative by the Cabinet Office (with the leadership of Sir Tim Berners-Lee) have been driven by these waves of change. And though many of us have been saying this for years, we must welcome the commitment of current administrations to release this data, as now the arguments are compelling. However, this is only the beginning of the process: we have to unwind some of the commercial partnerships government has in place to manage its information to ensure that it is released without conditions; we have to remove provisions like limitations on 'derived data' products when new opendata services want to use government data as a framework; we must look for ways to ensure that the innovations to be created are offered to all with full accessibility; and we must ensure that the legitimate privacy expectations of the citizen are not compromised by information releases.
So today is a good day. A very good day. But tomorrow we must get back to work to make this promised future happen.
Posted by raper at January 7, 2010 12:19 PM