The document discusses the benefits and policies surrounding open data in Australia, emphasizing its potential for economic growth, transparency, and improved public service delivery. It outlines the implementation of open data practices, including the establishment of data.gov.au, and showcases various case studies illustrating positive outcomes from data sharing initiatives. Challenges related to education, privacy, and the need for new skill sets in data management are also highlighted.

1. 1
The Shift to {Open|Big|Linked} Data
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the data
Pia Waugh
Director of Coordination and Gov 2.0
Technology and Procurement Division
Department of Finance

2. 2
Great expectations
Public expectations and problem solving
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zebble/8212264/

3. 3
[Open|Big|Government] Data
Credit: Joel Gurin (with permission)

4. 4
http://xkcd.com/898/
The emergence of the technocracy
Or... Remember to engage your geeks!

5. 5
Key Benefits to Community/Industry in Opening Data
Economic
• Creates opportunities for industry to value-add to government data
• New services, systems and industries
• New opportunities and innovation in industry, research, civil society
Accountability
• Visibility to government spending, projects, effectiveness, etc
• Increases incentive to follow evidence based approach
Better policy and programs
• Enables greater participation in policy planning and implementation
• More informed public → better decision making
• Improvements to data → better policy and decisions

6. 6
Key Benefits to the Public Service in Opening Data
• Cheaper and more modular services delivery
• Efficiency gains in publishing and answering requests
• Reduced regulatory burden through machine readable data
supporting industry and agency compliance
• Better policy outcomes by leveraging cross-agency data
• More consistency across government(s)
• Improved opportunities to leverage innovation and
collaboration (citizens, industry, other depts)
• Opportunities to improve data quality through
verifiable public contributions

7. 7
Key Case Studies
• Publishing Budget 2014 Data Report
• Open data – Transforming the Provider / Stakeholder Paradigm
• On the Value of Open Roof Prints
• 100 years of patent and IP data released on data.gov.au
More available soon at http://toolkit.data.gov.au
Other Australian case studies/documentation
• SA Open Data Toolkit
• QLD Government Case Studies
• Victorian Government Showcase
• NSW Apps Showcase
• ACT examples

8. 8
The APS eGov and Open Data Policy Landscape
Others:
• Publishing Public Sector Information & National Standards Framework
• Declaration of Open Government
• Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report
• Statement of IP Principles for Government (CC-BY)
• Ahead of the Game
• Digital Transition Policy (Archives) & Accessibility Policy
• Emerging Open Research Policies
• Open Public Sector Information: From Principles to Practice Report

9. 9
State and Territory Policies

10. 10
Policies Components
APS policies in aggregate:
• Permissive copyright – CC-BY as the default
• Open by default, machine readable accessible data
• Support reuse and innovation
• More public engagement
• Better use of data for government policy and service development
States/Territories add:
• Procurement – open by design
• Reporting – dashboards
• Departmental strategies
• Declaration of Open Data

11. 11
Policy and Implementation in the Commonwealth
Policy and Planning Implementation
Department
of Finance
(CTO & AGIMO)
Department of
Communications
(Data Policy Branch)
Data Efficiency
Working Group
(Project 4)
Project 4
Implementation
Sub-group
Open Data
Delivery Network
(CTO & Spatial Policy Branch)
• Data.gov.au
• FIND
• NationalMap
• NEII
• ABS data delivery
• Other gov data gateways
• Identify datasets
• Release datasets
• Identify shared services
• Develop private/public
partnerships
• Spatial Policy
• Open/Big/Spatial
strategic planning
• Open & Big data policy
• Open/Big/Spatial
strategic planning
Joint
Communications
Finance
Open Data
Community Forum
(CTO coordinated)
• Cross-jurisdiction collaboration
• Data.gov.au publishing community
• Bi-monthly meetings & training
• Online forum

12. 12
Simplified Guidance, Policy and Case Studies
http://toolkit.data.gov.au

13. 13
History of open data in Australia
Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report 2009 (based on PoIT UK). Led to:
1) Declaration of Open Government
2) CC-BY as default
3) Information Commissioner
4) data.gov.au and social media support/policy
5) Cloud/shared services
Myriad supporting tech and copyright policies over time
States/Territories, Federal and Local now largely aligned on open data

14. 14
Data Portals
Local Portals:
• City of Melbourne

15. 15
Open Data Discovery Model
National
Map
Datavis Application
development
Analysis
& Policy
Value Creation
Full Discovery
Discovery
Data
New
Services
FIND
National
spatial index
(gov, private,
research)

16. 16
data.gov.au
Free, cloud, scalable API enabled platform for hosting government data.
Staged approach
1. Publishing (2013 – mid 2014)
Improving the functionality and ease of
publishing for agencies with training and
documentation
2. Value realisation (Late 2014)
Providing useful front end tools for data.gov.au
including data visualisation and analysis tools.
Publishing quality data a pre-requisite.
3. Data quality (Late 2014)
Looking at ways to provide agencies the ability
to accept iterative data improvements in a
verifiable way
Features
•Manual and automated publishing options
• API access to government data
• Easy to publish, download & interact
• Use cases and site|data|org analytics
• Data Request Site
• Metadata harvesting from gov data gateways
• National Map integration
• Data model registry
In Planning
• 5 star quality plugin
• Selective crowdsourcing for updates
• Federated search for discoverability
• League Table

17. 17
NationalMap

18. 18

19. 19
DSS and ATO Statistics

20. 20
Spatial Case Study
1) Reduced work
2) Value adding
3) Quality
http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/02/24/guest-post-on-the-value-of-open-roof-prints/
improvements
4) Zero cost API
access to their
own data

21. 21
The Government Data Landscape (latest version online)

22. 22
Other Data Projects
• Administrative
• Spatial
• Research data
• Imagery
• Sensor
• Realtime (eg Transport)
• Census/Statistics
• Cultural
• Data about government
• Fiscal

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Data Integration
• Challenging but great potential for improved policy/services.
• Unit record sharing is complex, raises privacy concerns.
• Unit record data is mostly useful to researchers, who have appropriate
mechanisms with legal, technical, ethical constraints to access such data.
• Data aggregated by common spatial boundaries is comparative across
datasets and over time.
• Unfortunately, data owners traditionally aggregate to boundaries that
constantly change (electorates, postcodes, etc).
• The Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) provides a
consistent set of spatial boundaries that can be mapped to other needs.
• Anonymisation on the fly APIs also provide mechanism for appropriate
public/agency access to unit record level data (e.g. ABS.Stat)
http://statistical-data-integration.govspace.gov.au/
https://toolkit.data.gov.au/index.php?title=Definitions#Types_of_data

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Open by Design – drawing a line in the sand
Building proactive publishing into:
• Systems
• Processes
• Procurement
• Planning
• Records management
Leveraging open data through:
• Public APIs
• Analysis tools and datavis
• Internal processes looking for external sources
• Existing databases!

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Some Challenges
• Education
• Legislative
• Culture
• Systems
• Privacy and anonymisation
• Reactive vs proactive
• Metadata/semantic context
• Too much data
• Real time vs historic
• Definitions and common references
• Limited skills and over specialisation

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New and Old Skills Required
• Publishing and Automation
• Project management, reporting
• Metadata/linked data
• API development and serving
• Plumbing between systems
• Analysis and statistics
• Policy development
• Data, info and policy visualisation
• Public consultation and engagement
• Online community management

27. 27
Hypothetical: Government as an API
Care of fedAPI.gov

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The future is here....
And it is already widely distributed
Challenge #1: Collaborate
Challenge #2: Share
Challenge #3: Measure
Challenge #4: Play
Questions?
@piawaugh
@datagovau
data.gov.au
toolkit.data.gov.au
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_matt/35688926
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