[open-government] Data and public policy - OECD Social Justice Report

Sat Oct 29 15:40:58 UTC 2011

I entered into the discourse on open data to facilitate the production of
these types of reports.  I am really interested in public policy issues such
as social justice, health inequality and the environment and hope that open
data and open government policies will lead to being able to access these
types of data, especially at the neighbourhood scales.  I hope that apps
will open the door to access, but that eventually we will work toward
comprehensive access to data for this type analysis and develop new ways to
dialogue between citizen and government using data for evidence based
decision making.

Currently in Canada, it is incredibly difficult to put one of these reports
together. The way data are aggregated differ and because one has to try and
pry data from multiple federal agencies, multiple agencies in each province
and territory and from a number of municipal agencies.  Because of staff
changes in government offices, contacts are lost and numerous cold calls
have to be remade and data renegotiated.

Page 14 of this report shows the model used to create the indices.  At a
glance there are 29 variables, each consisting between one to 5 data sets
suggesting that potentially these data may need to be accessed from more
than 50 different public officials at different levels of government,
divisions, departments, etc.  Then there is the negotiating of use,
licenses, costs, aggregation, accuracy, timeliness and formats since no two
agencies even within one government department follow the same rule book and
in fact, access is often determined by the mood of the public official or
what they think the rules are.  Doing a time series is even more complex as
data are not collected at the same intervals.  A follow up report to track
trends requires almost the same amount of work since the data gathering
process often has to start nearly from scratch.  This is a highly
inefficient and cost prohibitive process.

To make matters worse, in Canada, we have lost our think tanks and national
social policy research organizations who used to do this kind of work as
their funding was cut, and of course we have lost the census.

I hope we can think of open data and open government to include apps to get
the bus, find a skating rink or remember to take out the garbage, but more
importantly, to inform public policy on transit, public health, and the
environment.  Also, with open data we need the resources to produce
information products such as this report.  Many things can be crowdsourced,
a census and this type of analysis cannot and there is a role for government
and non profit organizations to translate the data into meaningful
information and then for us to use that knowledge to improve, track and
critique or develop new programs to address what the data tell us.

Apps rely on one or two datasets, these reports rely on hundreds.  I want
the hundreds.

*Report -*
http://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/bst/de/media/xcms_bst_dms_34886_34887_2.pdf

*Info Page* -
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/&ei=dh2rTqy2KsLh0QGgtJWPDw&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCIQ7gEwAA&prev=/search%253Fq%253Dhttp://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de%2526hl%253Den%2526client%253Dsafari%2526rls%253

*NYTimes Op Ed - America’s Exploding Pipe Dream*:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/blow-americas-exploding-pipe-dream.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
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