Government data — catching the wave

The title idea and picture concept for this have been stolen wholesale from Adam Locker — a Data Architect at the FSA. He recently published a great blog post on Data as Institutional Memory and did an excellent talk at one of the Institute for Government’s Data Bites sessions.

Adam makes a statement that we’re approaching a tipping point for use of data in government — something with which I largely agree, but wonder if it’s because I’m inside a particular like-minded bubble.

There’s certainly a lot going on. In the past few weeks we’ve had both Open Data Camp and the ODI Summit both of which are regular events that have been running for some time. Gavin’s Warning Graphic Content and Giuseppe’s In Other News are both excellent newsletters about what’s happening in the area of government data.

LOTI is working on pan-London standardisation of information governance and a discovery for the next iteration of the London Data Store (which you can contribute to here).

The recruitment for the position of Government Chief Digital Officer is still on albeit probably derailed by the pre-election-period. Likewise Gaia and associates are doing sterling work putting together the National Data Strategy.

Register Dynamics are working hard on multiple things including tools for Data Custodians and evangelising personal data exchange.

Lots of government organisations are doing excellent work to improve their data or making it available to further empower users. Examples include, but are certainly not limited to, great work at the MoJ and Paul Downey with colleagues in the MHCLG, the GLA and the Land Registry spurring on the PropTech revolution.

The cross-gov Data Science Community continues to do excellent work.

Finally, the Institute for Government’s Data Bites monthly meet-ups for government data folks gives the community a opportunity to come together to discuss all of these points. All credit to Gavin for continuing to make that a success.

So, are we nearly at the tipping point? Are we about to catch the government data wave? Maybe, but much will naturally depend on the focus on the new administration after the election. Ministerial backing for an empowered Chief Data Officer (and the separate new role of Chief Digital Information Officer) will be critical.

What could help at this point? I’ve written about some of these suggestions before but these are some of the things that I think could make all the difference.

• While senior staff, data scientists, digital service owners and others are keen to use data to meet needs for users those responsible for its storage and sharing currently often have incentives which are in opposition to this. Setting up a UK branch of the NYC-based Data Stewards Network might help to foster a community of data owners that can see the value of carefully controlled sharing.
• Further introduction of reproducible analytical pipelines, perhaps as a cross-gov shared cloud service, will go a long way to give greater confidence in the use of the data we have.
• The National Data Strategy pushing for new digital services to enforce a separation of data stores from the services that use them in a 3-tier model would de-couple service ownership from data ownership and make it much less likely for organisations to hold duplicate data in multiple systems.
• I still believe that the ICO is the best organisation to be funded to create and support a central storage point for machine-readable Data Sharing Agreements.
• Even now I still think that part of the long-term solution is support for personal data stores — as advocated by Doc Searle’s excellent book The Intention Economy. There is much the government could be doing to work with the private sector to encourage the creation of these and to support their use in government services.

So, in short, we’ll see. Things are very definitely moving in the right direction and it feels like they are accelerating. Whether 2020 is the time when we start to crest the wave or if we’ll still be paddingly out to sea this time next year significantly depends on the support our community will get from those in power after the election. Either way, we’ll still be on board.