Public Information Access Opportunities in the UK

Brisbane.
The second plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Richard Allan, a former UK member of parliament who is now working with Cisco Systems and is involved with the UK government Power of Information Task Force. Public sector information consists in part of information about people and places, about public services, and about public culture; traditionally it exists across a data, an analysis, and a presentation layer. The former two are increasingly open for access, the latter also for more flexible interaction. With the rise of the Web as a public information medium, the number of public information Websites has multiplied almost beyond control, and in the UK there is now a drive to consolidate government Websites from over 2500 to a more manageable number in the future. (Even the UK and Australian secret services now have their Websites.)

But what are the frameworks for accessing such information? There is a general shift towards more open access to information, and younger generations of citizens (and public servants) increasingly expect such open access, of course; beyond this, some public servants are also active creators of information (through personal and institutional blogs and other sites), and more or less enlightened guidelines for such activity are being developed now. More broadly, the UK statistics office has deployed flexible click-use licences governing access to public information, and such information is then also intermeshed with private information (London traffic incident data with Google Maps, for example).

The UK Ordnance Survey is seen as an example of a very traditional organisation curently encountering such issues (literally so - it was founded in the 1740s). In the first place, it had been given the mission to generate income from its vast collection of geographical mapping data - but at the same time, what value may be generated by shifting to an open access model instead?

Beyond this, there also exist many technical barriers to accessing available data, of course; this is being addressed increasingly through the development of open APIs for Web information services, and beyond intended usage is also being used to create reverse-engineering mashups that divert traffic from commercial organisations (like Amazon) to public access organisations (such as public libraries). (The ShiftSpace project is an interesting global approach to this, incidentally.)

This also affects political and parliamentary information, of course; policy about parliamentary reporting has changed from a blanket ban (in the 18th century) to the introduction of the parliamentary Hansard (in the 19th century) to the introduction of an online Hansard (in the UK, in 1995); in 2000, UK activists created the FaxYourMP project, initially in response to what was seen as a highly intrusive form of legislation aimed at monitoring private communications; this was followed by TheyWorkForYou in 2004, which tracked the actions of individual parliamentarians, and the same site added video this year. The site automatically generates a profile of individual politicians' views on key political issues, of their overall parliamentary participation, and of their spending of electoral funds. (Similar projects are also being developed for the European Parliament and the UN Security Council, and Australia now has its own project, OpenAustralia.org.)

Such projects are no limited to inherently political information, of course; however, issue-based communities such as NetMums in the UK or RateMyCop in the US also often have significant political implications, and sites such as EveryBlock (which tracks crime data across the United States) also rely on public information, of course. At the same time, there are also increasing problems with the accidental release of sensitive data, however, and more broadly with questions of who controls access to such data (i.e., whether such access should be handed over to third party organisations such as Google - as it is, in practice, already, given the ubiquity of Google as a search tool).

Diverse forces drive or hinder such processes: civic activists and technology developers push the process, political leadership pushes and prevents almost in equal measure, commercial interests are similarly divided,and the workforce culture largely hinders rapid development.

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