Tag: education

Ten Years After

“Hear me calling, hear me calling loud, 
If you don’t come soon, I’ll be wearing a shroud.” – Ten Years After (1969)

Introduction

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my involvement with Open Data in Scotland. As I wrote here, back in 2009-2010 I’d been following the work that Chris Taggart and others were doing with open data, and was inspired by them to  create what I now believe to have been the first open data published in the public sector in Scotland.

This piece is a reflection of my own views. These views may be the same as those held by colleagues at Code The City or indeed on the civic side of the Open Government Partnership. I’ve not specifically asked other individuals in either group.

While my involvement in, and championing of, open data in Scotland is now a decade long, my enthusiasm for the subject and in the the social and economic benefits it can deliver, is undiminished by my leaving the public sector in 2017 after thirty four years. In fact the opposite is true: the more I am involved in the OD movement, and study what is being achieved beyond Scotland’s narrow borders, the more I am convinced that we are a country intent on squandering a rich opportunity, regardless of our politicians’ public pronouncements.

But the journey has not been easy. primarily due to a lack of direction from Scottish Government and little commitment, resource or engagement at all levels of public service. A friend who reviewed this blog post suggested that I should replace the picture of a birthday cake (above) with one of a naked human back bearing bleeding scars from the our battles. He’s right –  it is STILL a battle ten years on.

It is not as if the position in Scotland is getting better. We are moving at a glacial pace. The gap between Scotland and other countries in this regard is widening. I gave a talk earlier this year in which I showed assessments of Scotland, Romania and Kenya’s performance in Open Government (source: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/campaigns/global-report/ Vol 2) and asked the audience to identify which was Scotland.

Extracts from https://www.opengovpartnership.org/campaigns/global-report/ Vol 2
Extracts from Vol2 to of the Open Gov Partnership report

Show full version of graphic

Question: Which is Scotland? (Answer)

Economic opportunities

In February 2020 the European Data Portal published a report – The Economic Impact of Open Data – which sets out a clear economic case for open data. That paper looks at 15 previous studies between 1999 and 2020 which have examined at the market size of open data at national and international levels, measured in terms of GDP of each study’s geographical area.

Taking the average and median values from those reports (1.33%  and 1.19% respectively) and an estimated GDP for Scotland (2018) of £170.4bn we can see that the missed opportunity for Scotland is of the order of £2.027bn to £2.266bn per annum.  What is the actual value of the local market created by Scottish-created open data? if pushed for a figure I would estimate that it is currently worth a few hundred thousand pounds per annum, and no more. Quite a gap!

Meantime we have the usual suspect of consultants whispering sweetly in the ears of ministers, senior civil servants and council bosses that we should be monetising data, creating markets, selling it. There will be no mention, I suspect of the heavily-subsidised, private sector led, yet failed Copenhagen Data Exchange, I suspect. (Maybe they can make a few bob back selling the domain name! )

You can buy the failed CityDataExchange.com for just $5195
You can buy the failed CityDataExchange.com for just $5195

While this commercial approach to data may plug small gaps in annual funding for Scotland, and line the pockets of some big companies in the process, it won’t deliver the financial benefits at a national level of anything like the figures suggested by that EU Data Portal report but it will, in the process, actively hamper innovation and inhibit societal benefits.

I hear lots of institutions saying “we need to sell data” or “we need to sell access rights to these photos” or similar. Yet, in so many cases, the operation of the mechanisms of control; the staffing, administration, payment processing etc. far outstrips any generated income. When I challenged ex colleagues in local government about this behaviour their response was “but our managers want to see an income line”  to which we could add “no matter how much it is costing us.” And this tweet from The Ferret on Tuesday of this week is another excellent example of this!

I have also heard lots of political proclamations of “open and transparent” government in Scotland since 2014. Yet most of the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction. Don’t forget, when Covid 19 struck, Scotland’s government was reportedly the only political administration apart from Bolsonaro’s far right one in Brazil to use the opportunity to limit Freedom of Information.

Openness, really?

It is clear that there is little or no commitment to open data in any meaningful way at a Scottish Government level, in local authorities, or among national agencies. This is not to say that there aren’t civil servants who are doing their best, often fighting against political or senior administration’s actions.  Public declarations are rarely matched by delivery of anything of substance and conversations with people in those agencies (of which I have had many) paints a grim picture of political masters saying one thing and doing another, of senior management not backing up public statements of intent with the necessary resource commitment and, on more than occasion, suggestions of bad actors actually going against what is official policy.

I mention below that I joined the Open Government Partnership late in 2019. Initially I was enthusiastic about what we might achieve. While there are civil servants working dedicatedly on open government who want to make it work, I am unconvinced about political commitment to it. We really need to get some positive and practical demonstration that Scottish Government are behind us – otherwise I and the other civil society representatives are just assisting in an open-washing exercise.

In my view (and that of others) the press in Scotland does not provide adequate scrutiny and challenge of government. We have a remarkably ineffective political opposition. We also have a network of agencies and quangos which are reliant on the Scottish Government for funding who are unwilling to push back. All of this gives the political side a free pass to spout encouraging words of “open and transparent” yet do the minimum at all times.

We may have an existing Open Data Strategy for Scotland (2015) stating that Scotland’s data is “open by default”, yet my 2019 calculation was that over 95% of the data that could and should be open was still locked up. And there is little movement on fixing that.

We have many examples of agencies doing one thing and saying another, such as  Scottish Enterprise extolling the virtues of  Open Data yet producing none. Its one API has been broken for many months, I am told.

My good friends at The Data Lab do amazing work on funding MSc and Phd places, and providing funding for industrial research in the application of data science. Their mission is “to help Scotland maximise value from data …” yet they currently offer no guidance on open data, no targeted programme of support, no championing of open data at all, despite the widely-accepted economic advantages which it can deliver. There is the potential for The Data Lab to lead on how Scotland makes the most of open data and to guide government thinking on this!

All of this is not to pick on specific organisations, or hard working and dedicated employees within them. But it does highlight systemic failures in Scotland from the top of government downwards.

Fixing this is an enormous task: one which can only be done by the development of a fresh strategy for open data in Scotland, which is mandated for all public sector bodies, is funded as an investment (recognising the economic potential), and which is rigorously monitored and enforced.

I could go on…. but let’s look at this year’s survey.

(skip to summary)

Another year with what to show for it?

In February 2019 I conducted a survey of the state of open data in Scotland. It didn’t paint an encouraging picture. The data behind that survey has been preserved here. A year on, I started thinking about repeating the review.

In the intervening year I’d been involved in quite a bit activity around open data. I had

  • joined the civic side of the Open Government group for Scotland and was asked to lead for the next iteration of the plan on Commitment Three (sharing information and data) ,
  • joined the steering group of Stirling University’s research project, Data Commons Scotland,
  • trained as a trainer for Wikimedia UK, delivering training in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wiki Commons, and running multiple sessions for Code The City with a focus on Wikidata,
  • created an open Slack Group  for the open data community in Scotland to engage with one another,
  • created an Open Data Scotland twitter account which has gained almost 500 followers, and
  • initiated the first Scottish Open Data Unconference (SODU) 2020 which had been scheduled to take place as a physical event in March this year. That has now been reconfigured as an online unconference which will happen on 5th and 6th September 2020.

In restarting this year’s review of open data publishing in Scotland my aims were to see what had changed in the intervening 12 months and to increase the coverage of the survey: going broader and deeper and developing an even more accurate picture. That work spilled into March at which point Covid-19 struck. During lockdown I was distracted by various pieces of work. It wasn’t until August, and with a growing sense of the imminence of this 10-year anniversary, that I was galvanised to finish that review.

I am conscious that the methodology employed here is not the cleverest – one person counting only the numbers of datasets produced.  This is something I return to later.

The picture in 2020

I broke the review down into sectoral groupings to make it more managable to conduct. By sticking to that I hope to make this overview more readable. The updated Git Hub repo in which I noted my findings is available publicly, and I encourage anyone who spots errors or omissions to make a pull request to correct them. Each heading below has a link to the Github page for the research.

Overall there is little significant positive change. This is one factor which gives rise to concerns about government’s commitment to openness generally and open data specifically; and to a growing cynicism in the civic community about where we go from here.

Local Government

(Source data here)

I reviewed this area in February 2020 and rechecked it in August.  Sadly there has been no significant change in the publication of open data by local government in the eighteen months since I last reviewed this. More than a third of councils (13 out of a total of 32) still make no open data provision.

While the big gain is that Renrewshire Council have launched a new data portal with over fifty datasets, most councils have shown little or no change.

Sadly the Highland Council portal, procured as part of the Scottish Cities Alliance’s Data Cluster programme at £10,000’s cost, has vanished. I dont think it ever saw a dataset being added to it. Searching Highland Council’s website for open data finds nothing.

While big numbers of data sets don’t mean much by themselves, the City of Edinburgh Council has a mighty 236 datasets. Brilliant! BUT … none of them are remotely current. The last update to any of them was September 2019. Over 90% of them haven’t been updated since 2016 or earlier.

Similarly Glasgow, which has 95 datasets listed have a portal which is repeatedly offline for days at a time. A portal which won’t load is useless.

Dundee, Perth and Stirling continue to do well. Their offerings are growing and they demonstrate commitment to the long-haul.

Aberdeen launched a portal, more than three years in the planning, populated it with 16 datasets and immediately let their open data officer leave at the end of a short-term contract. Some of their datasets are interesting and useful – but there was no consultation with the local data community about what they would find useful, or deliver benefits locally; all despite multiple invitations from me to interact with that community at the local data meet-ups which I was running in the city.

It was hoped that the programme under the Scottish Cities alliance would yield uniform datasets, prioritised across all seven Scottish Cities, but there is no sign of that happening, sadly. So what you find on all portals or platforms is pretty much a pot-luck draw.

Where common standards exist – such as the 360 Giving standard for the publication of support for charities – organisations should be universally adopting these. Yet this is only used by two of 32 authorities, all of whom have grant-making services. Surely, during a pandemic especially,  it would be advantageous to funders and recipients to know who is funding which body to deliver what project?

Councils – Open Government Licence and RPSI

This is a slight aside from the publication of open data, but an important one. If the Scottish Authorities were to adopt an OGL approach to the publication of data and information on their website (as both the Scottish Government’s core site and the Information Commissioner for Scotland do) then we would be able to at least reuse data obtained from those sites. This is not a replacement for publishing proper open data but it would be a tiny step forward.

The table below (source and review data here)  shows the current permissions to reuse the content of Scottish Local Authorities’ websites. Many are lacking in clarity, have messy wording, are vague or misunderstand terminologies. They also, in the main, ignore legislation on fair re-use.

Table of local authority adoption of PGL and RPSI
Table of local authority adoption of PGL and RPSI
Open Government Licence

The Scottish Government’s own site is excellent and clear: permitting all content except logos to be be reused under the Open Government Licence. This is not true for local authorities. At present only Falkirk and Orkney Councils – two of the smaller ones – allow, and promote OGL re-use of content. There is no good reason why all of the public sector, including local government, should not be compelled to adopt the terms of OGL.

Re-use of Public Sector Information (RPSI) Regulations

Since 2015 the public sector has been obliged by the RPSI Regulations to permit reasonable reuse of information held by local authorities. So, even if Scottish LAs have not yet adopted OGL for all website content, they should have been making it clear for the last five years how a citizen can re-use their data and information from their website.

In my latest trawl through the T&Cs and Copyright Statements of 32 Scottish Local Authorities, I found only 7 referencing RPSI rights there, with 25 not doing so (see the full table above). I am fairly sure that these authorities are breaking the legal obligation on public bodies to provide that information.

Finally, given the presence of COSLA on the Open Government Scotland steering group, the situation with no open data; poor, missing or outdated data; and OGL and PRSI issues needs to be raised there and some reassurance sought that they will work with their member organisations to fix these issues.

Health

(Source data here)

The NHS Scotland Open Data platform continues to be developed as a very useful resource. The number of datasets  there has more than doubled since last year (from 26 to 73).

None of the fourteen Health Boards publish their own open data beyond what is on the NHS Scotland portal.

Only one of the thirty Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) publish anything resembling open data: Angus HSCP.

COVID-19 and open data

While we are on health, I’ve wrote (here and here) early in the pandemic about the need for open data to help the better public understanding of the situation, and stimulate innovative responses to the crisis. The statistics team at Scottish Government responded well to this and we’ve started to develop a good relationship. I’ve not followed that up with a retrospective about what did happen. Perhaps I will in time.

It was clear that the need for open data in CV19 situation caught government and health sector napping. The response was slower than it should have been and patchy, and there are still gaps. People find it difficult to locate data when it is on muliple platforms, spread across Scots Govt, Health and NRS. That is, in a microcosm, one of the real challenges of OD in Scotland.

With an open Slack group for Open Data Scotland there is a direct channel that data providers could use to engage the open data community on their plans and proposals. They could also to sound out what data analysts and dataviz specialists would find useful. That opportunity was not taken during the Covid crisis, and while I was OK in the short term with being used as a human conduit to that group, it was neither efficient nor sustainable. My hope is that post SODU 2020, and as the next iteration of the Open Gov Scotland plan comes together we will see better, more frequent, direct engagement with the data community on the outside of Government, and a more porous border altogether.

Further and Higher Education

(Source data here)

There is no significant change across the sector in the past 18 months. The vast majority of institutions make no provision of open data. Some have vague plans, many of them historic – going back four years or more – and not acted on.

Lumping Universities and Colleges together, one might expect at a minimum properly structured and licensed open data from every institution on :

  • courses
  • modules
  • events
  • performance (perhaps some of this is on HESA and SFC sites?)
  • physical assets
  • environmental performance
  • KPI targets and achievements etc.

Of course, there is none of that.

Universities and colleges

I reviewed open data provision of Universities and Colleges around 17 February 2020. I revisited this on 11 August 2020, making minor changes to the numbers of data sets found.

While five of fifteen universities are publishing increasing amounts of data in relation to research projects, most of which are on a CC-0 or other open basis, there continues to be a very limited amount of real operational open data across the sector with loads of promises and statements of intent, some going back several years.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency publishes a range of potentially useful-looking Open Data under a CC-BY-4.0 licence. This is data about insitutions, course, students etc – and not data published by the institutions themselves. But I could identify none of that. Overall, this was very disappointing.

Further, while there are 20 FE colleges. None produces anything that might be classed as open data. A few have anything beyond vague statement of intent. Perhaps City of Glasgow College not only comes closest, but does link to some sources of info and data.

The Crighton Observatory

While doing all of this, I was reminded of the Crighton Institute’s Regional Observatory which was announced to loud fanfares in 2013 and appears to have quietly been shut down in 2017. Two of the team involved say in their Linked In profiles that they left at the end of the project. Even the domain name to which articles point is now up for grabs (Feb 2020).

It now appears (Aug 2020) that the total initial budget for the project was >£1.1m. Given that the purpose of the observatory was to amass a great deal of open data,  I have also attempted to find out where the data is that it collected and where the knowledge and learning arising from the project has been published for posterity? I can’t locate it. This FOI request may help. The big question: what benefits did the £1.1m+ deliver?

Scottish Parliament

(Source data here).

In February 2019 I found that The Scottish Parliament had released 121 data sets. This covers motions, petitions, Bills, petitions and other procedural data, and is very interesting. This year we find that they have still 121 data sets, so, there are no new data sources.

In fact that number is misleading. In February 2020  I discovered that while 75 of these have been updated with new data, the remaining 46 (marked BETA) no longer work. As of August 2020 this is still the case. Why not fix them, or at worst clear them out to simplfy the finadbility of working data?

Some of these BETA datasets should contain potentially more interesting / useful data e.g. Register of Members Interests but just don’t work. Returning: [“{message: ‘Data is presently unavailable’}”]

I didn’t note the availability of APIs last year, but there are 186 API calls available. Many of these are year-specific. I tested half a dozen and about a third of those returned error messages. I suspect some of these align with the non-functioning historic BETAs.

Sadly the issues raised a year ago about the lack of clarity of the licensing of the data is unchanged. To find the licence, you have to go to Notes > Policy on Use of SPCB Copyright Material. Following the first link there (to a PDF) you see that you have to add “Contains information licenced under the Scottish Parliament Copyright Licence.” to anything you make with it, which is OK. But if you go to the second link “Scottish Parliament Copyright Licence” (another PDF) the wording (slightly) contradicts that obligation. It then has a chunk about OGL but says, “This Scottish Parliament Licence is aligned with OGLv3.0” whatever that means. Why not just license all of the data under OGL? I can’t see what they are trying to do.

Scottish Government

(Source data here)

Trying to work out the business units within the structure of Scottish Government is a significant challenge in itself. Attempting to then establish which have published open data, and what those data sets are, and how they are licensed, is almost an impossible task. If my checking, and arithmetic are right, then of 147 discrete business units, only 27 have published any open data and 120 have published none.

So we can say with some confidence  that the issue with findability of data raised in Feb 2019 is unchanged, there being no central portal for open data in the Scottish public sector or even for Scottish Government. Searching the main Scottish Government website for open data yields 633 results, none of which are links to data on the first four screenfuls. I didn’t go deeper than that.

The Scottish Government’s Statistics Team have a very good portal with 295 Data Sets from multiple organisational-providers. This is up by 46 datasets on last year and includes a two new organisations: The Care Inspectorate and Registers of Scotland. The latter, so far (Aug 2020), has no datasets on the portal.

There are some interesting new entrants into the list of  those parts of Scottish Government publishing data such as David MacBrayne Limited which is, I believe, wholly owned by SG and is the parent, or operator of Calmac Ferries Limited.  On 1st March 2020 they released a new data platform to get data about their 29 ferry routes. This is very welcome. After choosing the dates, routes and traffic types you can download a CSV of results. While their intent appears to be to make it Open Data, the website is copyright and there is no specific licensing of the data. This is easily fixable.

It is also interesting to contrast Transport Scotland with work going on in England. Transport Scotland’s publication scheme says of open data “Open data made available by the authority as described by the Scottish Government’s Open Data Strategy and Resource Pack, available under an open licence. We comply with the guidance above when publishing data and other information to our website. Details of publications and statistics can be found in the body of this document or on the Publications section of our website.” I searched both without success for any OD. Why not say “we don’t publish any Open Data”? Compare this complete absence of open data with even the single project Open Bus Data for England. Read the story here. Scotland is yet again so far behind!

Summary

In the review of data I’ve shown that little has changed in 18 months. Very few branches of government are publishing open data at all. The landscape is littered with outdated and forgotten statements of good intent which are not acted on; broken links; portals that vanish or don’t work; out of date data; yawning gaps in publication and so on.

The claim of “Open By Default” in the current (2015) Open Data Strategy is misleading and mostly ignored with consequence.  The First Minister may frequently repeat the mantra of “Open and Transparent” when speaking or questioned by journalists, but it is easily demonstrable that the administration frequently act in the directly opposite way to that.

The recent situations with Covid-19 and the SQA exams results show Scotland would have found itself in a much better place this year with a mature and well-developed approach to open data: an approach one might have reasonably expected after five full years of “open by default”.

The social and economic arguments for open data are indisputable. These have been accepted by most other governments of the developed world. Importantly, they have also been taken up and acted on by developing nations who have in many cases overtaken Scotland in their delivery of their Open Government plans.

The work I have done in 2019 and in this review is not a sustainable one – i.e. one single volunteer monitoring the activity of every branch and level of government  in Scotland. And the methodology is limited to what is achievable by an individual.

A country which was serious about Open Data would have targets and measures, monitoring and open reporting of progress.

  • It wouldn’t just count datasets published. It would be looking at engagement, the usefulness of data and its integration into education.
  • It would fund innovation: specifically in the use of open data; in the creation of tools; in developing services to both support government in creating data pipelines, and in helping citizens in data use.
  • It would co-develop and mandate the use of data standards across the public sector.
  • It would develop and share canonical lists of ‘things’ with unique identifiers allowing data sets to be integrated.
  • It would adopt the concept of data as infrastructure on which new products, services, apps, and insights could be built.

I really want Scotland to make the most of the opportunities afforded by Open Data. I wouldn’t have spent ten years at this if I didn’t believe in the potential this offers; nor if I didn’t have the evidence to show that this can be done. I wouldn’t be giving up my time year-on-year researching this, giving talks, organising groups and creating opportunities for engagement.

What is fundamentally lacking here is some honesty from Scottish Government ministers instead of their pretence of support for open data.

 

Ian Watt
20 August 2020

Link to an index of pieces I have written on Open Data:
http://watty62.co.uk/2019/02/open-data-index-of-pieces-that-i-have-written/

Answer to quiz

Scotland is B, in the centre. Kenya is A, and Romania C.
I could have chosen Mexico, Honduras, Paraguay, Uruguay – or others. All are doing better than Scotland.

Back up to the quiz

Header Image by David Ballew on Unsplash.

Open Data Scotland – a nudge from OD Camp?

Note: This blog post was originally published in November 2018 at CodeTheCity.co.uk and was archived here with redirects from the original URL. 

Over the first weekend of November 2018, just over 100 people congregated in Aberdeen to attend the UK Open Data Camp. We’d pushed hard to bring it to Scotland, and specifically Aberdeen, for the first time. The event, the sixth of its type, which follows an unconference model where the attendees set the agenda, has previously taken place in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I’m not going to go through what we did over the weekend, you can find plenty of that here and here. There are links to all 44 sessions which took places on this Google doc, and many of those have collaborative notes taken during the sessions.

Instead this is a reflective piece, seeking to understand what OD Camp can show us about the state of Open Data in Scotland and beyond.

Who was there?

Of the 100+ attendees, including camp-makers, we estimate that about 40 were from the public sector. Getting exact numbers is hard – people register in their own name, with their own email addresses, but we think that is a good guess.

While this sounds good, during the pitching session on the first day Rory Gianni asked a question: “Hands up who is here from the Scottish public sector?” Two people’s hands went up out of 100+. Each were from local authorities, Aberdeen and Perth city councils, and a third (also from Aberdeen) joined later on Saturday.

This is really concerning and shows the gulf between what Scotland could, or rather must, be doing and what is actually happening.

The Scottish Public Sector

It is estimated that the Scottish Civil Service encompasses 16,000+ officers. It encompasses 33 directorates,  nine executive agencies  and around 90 Non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs) plus other odds and ends such as the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

Then we have 14 health boards, 32 local authorities, 32 Joint Health and Social Care Partnerships and so on.

All of these should be producing open data.

Reality

Sadly, we are very far from that. Few are of any scale or quality. I’ve written about this extensively in the past including in this blog post and its successor post.

So, if we use attendance by the Scottish public sector, at a free-to-attend event which was arranged for them on their very doorstep, as a barometer of commitment to open data, it is clear that something is rotten in the state of Denmark Scotland.

Three weeks on

Since the event, I’ve reached out to the Scottish Government through two channels. I contacted the Roger Halliday, the Chief Statistician, the senior civil servant with a responsibility for Open data, and responded to a Twitter contact from Kate Forbes, the minister for Public Finance and Digital Economy.

I then had an hour-long conversation with Roger and two of his colleagues. This was a very positive discussion. I took away that there is a genuine commitment to doing things better, underpinned by a realism about capacity and capability to widely deliver publication and engagement with the wider OD community. I have agreed to be part of a round table meeting on OD to be held in the new year – and have expressed a commitment to assist in any way needed to improve things.

Meanwhile

Ironically, in the midst of this three week period, the Scottish Government published its Open Government action plan. This emerged on 14th November and is open for feedback until 27th November. So, if you are quick, you can respond to that – and I encourage you to do so. While this certainly seeks to move things in the right direction in terms of openness and transparency, it is extremely light on open data and committed actions to address some of the issues which I have raised.

My next blog post will be a copy of the feedback which I provide, and on which I am currently working.

And finally

When I started drafting this post I was in a very negative frame of mind as regards the Scottish Open Data scene – and particularly in terms of the public sector. In the intervening period, I  launched the Scottish Open Data Action group on Twitter. The thinking  behind this was to get together a group of activists to swell the public voice beyond mine and that of ODI Aberdeen.

Given the way things are moving on with the Scottish Government and the positive engagement that has begun, the group, which is in its infancy, may not be needed as a vocal pressure group. Instead we could be a supportive external panel who provide expertise and encouragement as needed. Who knows – let’s see!

Scottish Open Data – how do we get there?

Note: This post was first published in in June 2018 on the CodeTheCity.co.uk blog and has been archived here with redirects from the URL. 

There is an oft-repeated joke in which a tourist, completely lost in the Irish countryside, asks an old fellow who is leaning on a gate at the edge of a field, “Can you tell me how to get to Dublin?” After a long pause, the old guy replies, “Well, you don’t want to start from here”.

Previously, I covered open data in Scotland from 2010 to the present. Now I look ahead, but to get there we need to start from where we currently find ourselves.

Scottish open data publishing – now

Earlier this week I spent a couple of hours pulling this list together as a first snapshot of the current open data publishing landscape. The intention is to present an accurate precis of the current state, within the available time to do the research. If I have missed anything, or got it wrong, let me know and I will fix it.

There have been sporadic attempts – of varying size, cost, and success – to make Scottish open data available. How these were initiated or funded varies. Examples include bodies such as Nesta, individual local authorities, groups such as the Scottish Cities Alliance (SCA), and by the Scottish Government.

It appears that at the time of writing that the SCA programme (which is scheduled to run from Jan 2017 to Dec 2018) has so far delivered new open data portals for Dundee, Perth, Inverness and Stirling. Some of these have started to publish a few data sets and others, 18 months into the programme, are still waiting to do so. Aberdeen, who dropped out in late 2017, announced in May of this year that they were back on board, but so far there is no sign of anything being delivered. Even the open data landing pages which  Aberdeen City Council once hosted have been removed, although I have heard mention of some GIS open data due to be released.

Edinburgh and Glasgow had existing portals prior to the SCA programme. In Edinburgh’s case, while it has an impressive 234 datasets, only four of these have been updated in the last six months, and no new data sets added for over 15 months.

It looks like Glasgow’s open data platform is a new one, replacing the one created as part of the TSB funded £20m+ future cities programme (PDF. Links to original site have disappeared). It used to host over 370 data sets. The new one has far fewer: 72 . While a number of these have been added to the new portal this year, many of them are historic: e.g. house sales data only go to 2013, which suggests that these are ported from the old site and not updated. It also suggests that around 300 data sets have vanished (temporarily, we hope)!

Some considerable recent attention, and an award, has been given to a project carried out on business rates data by North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) with partners Snook and Urban Tide. This is part of a programme funded by the ODI, and the press coverage reiterates NLC’s claim to have an open by default policy. I know both Urban Tide and Snook, and their work – so I am sure that it will be great. In researching this, though, I could find no data.

In response to my enquiries NLC told me that they are testing a platform. Interestingly, Edinburgh has claimed in the past to have an open-by-default policy for data too, which I cannot locate. Sadly this position is not supported by their own portal’s current condition.

Similarly, Renfrewshire have an Open Data in Renfrewshire page, “The Council is taking a lead role in complying with the Scottish Government’s Open Data Strategy“, the Dublin Code data of which show it was created, and last updated in April 2016. They have a 25-page strategy dated 2015 with a commitment to open data by default, but NO open data that I can find; not even an entry in their website A-Z.

When we created the business case for the SCA data programme, I was quite clear that each of the 7 local authorities were procuring a portal for their city, not for the council.  This is an important point. When local councils fail to provide a platform, and data, it is not just the local authority’s image it is tarnished – they are failing citizens, academia and businesses alike.

Where can we see best practice in action?

Sadly, the answer isn’t in Scottish local government, at least for now. Perhaps, when the SCA project reaches its conclusion in December, there will more to show for it. Let us hope.

The Scottish Government has a great resource in the Scottish Indices of Multiple Deprivation site, using Linked Open Data, that Swirrl developed for them – with excellent visualisation.

SIMD data visualisation
SIMD data visualisation

It also has its Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure hub which presents geospatial data for both local authority and Scottish Government. This is a welcome resource but is not without its challenges. I’ve not found a way to search by licence (as it appears that not all data is licensed for reuse) and some of the data formats (e.g. WMS or WFS) are more suited to other specialists rather than the general public.

In the third sector, ALISS with help from Rory Gianni have done some very good work on the ALISS v4 API.

If you know of other high quality examples which I have missed, please let me know.

What stops publishers doing better?

I have had many conversations about this over the years. Since I wrote part one of this mini-series several people contacted me with their thoughts about the Scottish Public Sector’s approach to OD.

Issues which get in the way of doing it right (in no particular order) include:

  • Lack of awareness (or deliberate ignoring) of legal commitments to provide the data
  • No open data policy, so it is easy to not do it.
  • No organisational commitment
  • A lack of understanding by, and therefore no support from, senior managers / elected members
  • Short term-ism. Too frequently, OD is delivered as a project, not a long-term commitment
  • No clear responsibility for OD, or the wrong people / roles with responsibility
  • Lack of awareness of benefits (to organisation, to economy, to society)
  • Lack of capacity or lack of skills
  • Lack of engagement with wider data community
  • Imagined barriers, or no drive to overcome them
  • Poor data management, and / or siloed structures within the organisation
  • Data hoarding by services (“data is power and I am not giving mine up”)
  • Legal restrictions on publishing (real or imagined)

I can’t deal with all of these in this post – and many are cultural, and need to be resolved by the organisations themselves, but I will address a few of these below. It should also be noted that the G8 Charter on Open Data from 2013, and the Scottish Government’s 2015 Open Data Strategy (PDF), mean that not publishing is simply not an option.

Screenshot of SG's Open Data Strategy 2015
Screenshot of SG’s Open Data Strategy 2015

But, licensing …

While not all open data is geospatial, a significant proportion is, and particularly useful one at that. A common barrier which is raised when electing not to release geospatial data is the licensing restrictions imposed by Ordnance Survey. Sometimes these are genuine issues but on occasion these difficulties are either thrown up by over-cautious individuals or those who can’t be bothered to research and tackle them.

I do recognise that the issue is a complex one but it is worth comparing the likes of the Surrey Planning Hub which offers a developer-friendly API returning fully-geocoded planning application data for all local authorities in an entire county, with – for example – the Scottish Spatial Hub which hosts 27 amalgamated spatial datasets for the 32 councils. Only three of these are open data. If you try to download the Planning Application data (c.f. Surrey) you are asked for a authentication key. If you try to register for one you are informed that you can only do so if you work for a local authority.

Surrey Planning API – json code
Surrey Planning API – json code
Spatial Hub Says No
Spatial Hub Says No

If anyone can explain why Surrey and Hampshire Hub, and other English authorities such as Camden can offer downloads of planning open data, of this quality and Scotland can’t, I would love to hear that. At its heart I believe there a misunderstanding about the OS Licence for Derived Data and presumption to publish.

This recent blog post by Ben Proctor, based on work at OD Camp Belfast, gives as good a set of guidance, and some debunking of myths. His summary hits the nail on the head: “The vast majority of derived data based on OS information can just be published by public bodies under this ‘presumption to publish’.”

The vast majority of derived data based on OS information can just be published by public bodies under this ‘presumption to publish’.

An announcement last week by Ordnance Survey points in the direction of further openness and a more permissive licensing regime (see this post by Owen Boswarva) and this is ahead of the formation and work of the new Geospatial Commission (GC).

So, perceived licence issues will soon be no longer being a barrier behind which the mis-informed can shelter. If I were working in local government data, or in a Scottish Government directorate, I would be proactively planning now how I am going to start to publish it.

Of course, the issues are not just with with publication.

Is there an open data community in Scotland?

There is currently no easily-defined Scottish network of those interested in OD. Apart from our own ODI Aberdeen, our monthly Data Meetup in Aberdeen and the regular work we do under the charity Code The City banner, there are some groups such as the Open Knowledge Network branches in Edinburgh and Glasgow, currently with no scheduled meetings . There are various tech meet-ups. There is a Scottish Linked Data Interest Group which meets sporadically. And MBN who, with Data Lab, support our Aberdeen Data Meetup, also run a related one in Glasgow. There is no umbrella group, or co-ordination yet.

The aim of the Aberdeen meet-up is to create that city-region local data community: bringing together interested, engaged participants from academia, citizens, community groups, developers, councils, Scots Govt departments, private companies and others. Open data is a large part of that conversation as well as data science and other related topics.

Activity such as that should be happening in each of the seven cities, and across Scotland more generally. While it doesn’t have to be driven by the local council – ours wasn’t – it should open up a meaningful dialogue with authorities: demonstrating need, prioritising specific data, providing feedback, creating opportunities for data use, identifying data in others’ hands, providing advocacy etc.

When we created the Scottish Cities Alliances Open Data programme, one of the four planned work streams, which was well-funded, was the nurturing of local data communities. Our aim was to move from the position of council as provider, and citizen / developer as consumer, of data, to one of all interested parties working together. As I said in that piece, “Going beyond publication, the true value of open data will be realised in its re-use and in the innovative uses to which it is put. The SCA partners will work to develop city-region open data eco-systems where the public, third and private sectors collaborate to encourage data use, economic stimulation and creative approaches to solving civic challenges.”

Going beyond publication, the true value of open data will be realised in its re-use and in the innovative uses to which it is put. The SCA partners will work to develop city-region open data eco-systems where the public, third and private sectors collaborate to encourage data use, economic stimulation and creative approaches to solving civic challenges.

As an adjunct to the SCA programme I put forward a proposal in 2017 for funding of a Code For Scotland programme, based on our experience as part of Code For Europe 2014 (PDF). There was a general support for it, but it was put on hold at the time. Part of the idea behind that was to provide seed support for creating a grass-roots movement to work with data in each Scottish city. In the absence of that, or to complement it should it come about, we do need to create informal networks of open data groups across the country.

Cover of the Nesta Open Data Scotland report
Cover of the Nesta Open Data Scotland report

So, what’s missing?

I subscribe to the notion that data in public hands is a common asset – and should be treated as such: a concept sometimes referred to as a data commons. Getting to that position entails quite a change in thinking and action. A first step is to create open data, publishing that in a way that easily allows, or encourages, re-use, with clear permissive licensing.

Drawing from the points above, to achieve the potential offered by open data (and already realised in more progressive places) Scotland needs the following:

  • The Scottish Government, and its many branches, Local Government, Health Boards, and others must now demonstrate a commitment to publish open data. This should follow the Enschede model and implement an open-by-default data policy. This means having the policy formally adopted, published, and committed to by all managers and employees.
  • We need to stop seeing open data as a separate activity to an organisation’s other data governance. It is not. Open data can be regarded to some degree as a barometer of how well an organisation manages its data assets.
  • Government need to move beyond ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ attitude to data publishing, and to work with all partners to make it usable, useful and used.
  • While publishing static open data at three-star level on the five star model is useful starting point, it is not in itself an end. We need
    • linked open data and API access,
    • registers of trusted data, and reference data,
    • common standards such as DCAT to enable interoperability between data catalogues.
  • Collaboration is key – and organisations should band together to share some of the heavy lifting. This increases outcomes, improves standards and reduces local cost. We should bin the ‘not invented here mentality’ and look further afield for where work of high quality is taking place. We should share these best practices like this.
  • While we are on this topic, individual councils should abandon the “we’re special” mentality which surfaces far too often. All unitary authorities essentially provide the same bunch of services, and have the same core systems from few suppliers. Each would benefit from increased co-operation, collaboration and common approaches to data management and publication.
  • Academia needs to get behind the open data movement. Data Lab and its many partner universities should be actively involved in the Scottish open data eco-system. MSc programmes (and undergraduate courses) should
    • regularly use open data, and
    • teach how to make use of it,
    • show how to build new and innovative services,
    • encourage students to be advocates for open data, how to request it, and to act as an intermediary between the publisher and the citizen.
  • We should then extend that to school pupils – linking it to the curriculum, demonstrating how to use data, interpret and understand it, build with it.
  • Each local city region, at a minimum, should have an active open data group – and links between these should be encouraged. Funding for this core part of the eco-system should be seen by Scottish and Local government as an investment in the economic and social future of Scotland.
  • The whole is greater than the sum of the parts: recruiting and involving additional local partners, such as local businesses, to make their data open will significantly enhance what the data community can build or create.
  • We need more meet-ups, events, competitions, challenges, and opportunities for data scientists, coders, analysts to work with government data.

And what will you do?

As the old adage says, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” So my challenge to you is, whatever your role, what are you doing to bring this about?

For local government in particular, please stop boasting about what you are going to do. Do that thing whatever it is, make it live, publish the data, deliver that policy, live up to promises – then you can boast about it.

If you have a responsibility for data and you aren’t actively pushing for its release as open data then you are probably in the wrong job.

If you are a politician, or elected official, and you are not questioning why your organisation is not publishing open data and supporting its use then you should stop down, and let someone who understands this stand for your seat.

If you work in Economic Development, Community Development, Health, Social Care, Transport, Environmental Services or anything else and you aren’t supporting a movement which can positively impact on your area of specialism then your need rethink your commitment to that role.

If you find yourself justifying why you haven’t published, couldn’t get support, would have liked to but , didn’t get a budget, weren’t supported, ‘legal’ said no, the dog ate your data…. please stop. I have heard excuses from all quarters for the last eight years. No more, please.

If you are an academic and your course neither makes use of, nor champions, open data, then revise your course materials (they could probably do with a refresh anyway).

If you are a developer, citizen, journalist, analyst – whatever – and you are not part of a local data meet-up, join one. If there isn’t one, start one.

If your local authority isn’t publishing open data, ask them why: lobby councillors, use FOI, get in the press.

Stop waiting for others to make stuff happen!

My intention is to write a follow up to this section, with a more detailed list of suggestions, links to handy guides, useful publications etc.

And finally

I am always up for a conversation about this. If you want to make the right things happen, and need advice, or guidance, for your organisation, business or community, then we can help you. Please get in touch. You can find me here or here or fill in this contact form and we will respond promptly.

Header Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash