Note on Open Data Progress by Emer Coleman

We had a very positive meeting of the Open Data Governance Board on 4 April in Dublin where the Secretariat shared the impressive work that they have been doing with public bodies over the past couple of months. At the last meeting we asked the Secretariat to get all Departments to share lists of their high value datasets so that we could go to the open data community and civil society to help us prioritise the data release pipeline.

Departments and other public bodies have come back with numbers of datasets but without detailing what these datasets are but at least we now have some metrics to work with and are reverting to the public bodies to get the fine detail. Once we have this we will merge all of this data and release publicly so that we can begin the public process of prioritization. We believe that this type of public engagement is important for a number of reasons.

Often internal stakeholders identify a dataset as high value - because it is of high value to them but may be of little interest to the developer community or civil society. External viewers can often spot use cases from datasets that internal stakeholders place no value on - or see how one dataset when combined with another - can create a product or service that internal stakeholders would never think about.

We’ll update on this as soon as we get a firm sense of timelines but we are anxious to see as much momentum on this as possible.

At the last Board meeting members had also expressed concern about the usability of datasets in data.gov.ie and requested some analysis with regard to how many of the existing datasets met the required technical standards to be declared fully “open”. This analysis was presented to the Board by Deirdre Lee from Derilinx  and in summary it appears that out of the datasets published (https://data.gov.ie/stats) some of these are not associated with the Open Licence (Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY) and, therefore, do not comply with the Technical Framework (https://data.gov.ie/technical-framework). The Technical Framework is clear that only datasets associated with the recommended Open Data licence may be included on data.gov.ie. However, datasets clearly associated with another licence, such as the PSI Licence, may be linked to the Open Data portal provided a  commitment is made to using the Open Standard licence within a clearly defined timeframe. Our intention is to have 100% compliance with the Technical Framework for data on the portal and we have asked the Secretariat to formally request this clarity regarding the move to the CC-BY licence. Following the meeting, the Secretariat will contact relevant public bodies requesting adoption of CC-BY with a view to achieving 100% compliance within an agreed timeframe.

The Board also heard from the founder of Benefacts - an initiative funded by DPER, The Atlantic Philanthropies and The Ireland Funds. You can read more about their work at https://en.benefacts.ie/2016/04/08/benefacts-open-data-governance-board/.