How to get public data out of large bureacracies in the uk, based on personal experience. At Future Everything Manchester 13 May 2010

1. Open Data: moving the immovable – getting data out of bureaucracies Future Everything: Open Data conference 13 May 2010 #futr William Perrin william@talkaboutlocal.org @willperrin Former Secretary to Power of Information Taskforce http://powerofinformation.wordpress.com/ Local Public Data Panel Member http://www.communities.gov.uk/corporate/researchandstatistics/publicdatasources/localdatapanel/ Founder talk about local http://talkaboutlocal.org

2. The Dozer Apply huge force or do something so outrageous they can’t miss it

3. BCC DIY Functional rebuild by volunteers of £2.8m Birmingham City Council site Arguably most radical grass roots web project in this space right now

4. Make sure you do in fact have a bulldozer and don’t suffer a scale problem Can your bulldozer deliver? You look stupid if not

5. ‘A crack team of data ferrets working for the Task Force have returned from their first forays into the bowels of Government. ‘ People inside the organisation who can seek out specific data targets and release them Say in chief executives office

7. Avalanche Bury them in FOI requests and build an external archive

8. Birmingham Epic parking ticket investigation using data from FOI Isolated weird behaviour by wardens

9. Snow machine Reference the data released in CKAN

10. For a big leap you need leadership External influencers make best impact

11. There are two philosophies to putting data on the web. The top-down one is to make a corporate or national plan, by getting committees together of all the interested parties, and make a consistent set of terms (ontology) into which everything fits. This in fact takes so long it is often never finished, and anyway does not in fact get corporate or national consensus in the end. The other method experience recommends is to do it bottom up. A top-level mandate is extremely valuable, but grass-roots action is essential. Put the data up where it is: join it together later. Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/GovData.html

12. You need a blend of all of these No magic bullet New government expected to continue drive to open data

13. Never ever bide your time and wait Bureaucracies are world class at waiting and they will win