[Open-data-census] open-data-census Digest, Vol 18, Issue 3

Mon Nov 3 13:20:11 UTC 2014

Hi Pierre

2/ and 4/  I had a specific email exchange with Christian / Mor to clarify
chained or independent (independent) to ensure consistency ;O)

3b/  I think experienced people in the #opendata community typically side
with the lowest common denominator, you are benchmarking to improve so
hopefully not already perfect or nothing left to do!

3b/  similarly the issue is often willing volunteers and/or unpaid hours.
I might have been able to persuade someone else to independently
contribute/review Isle of Man submissions but difficult to justify
unquantified unpaid hours to do the same for other jurisdictions -- last
time I did submissions for about 16 countries and this time I allocated any
spare unpaid hours to briefly review Jersey (ran out of time on Guernsey)
but added some data on other jurisdictions such as UAE, US Virgin Islands,
etc.

people that know what/how to look are thin on the ground in big countries
never mind little countries, hence the importance of mentors office hours
initiatives etc

3b/  the push towards a localised UK OGL and financereports.gov.im were
large steps in an offshore country and required *lots* of unpaid hours on
lobbying, slidedecks, favours such as indirect legal opinion from HM
Attorney General, frontline staff training on data cleansing, etc.
sorry, perhaps I have missed something, but the financereports.gov.im
microsite shows govt spending in a timescale at least as good as most of
the best countries and better than most other countries and under a
localised UK OGL -- the OGL in conjunction with independent criteria is
largely why the Isle of Man is higher in the charts

in fact the end result of a ranking last year was the Isle of Man
Government requested membership of the Open Government Partnership, surely
exactly what anyone in the open government movement should aspire to
achieve?

also scheduled discussions already include a shift to real time reporting
of the national accounts with data visualisation as a
minister/voter/taxpayer frontend

Best regards,
Graeme Jones

On 3 November 2014 12:00, <open-data-census-request at lists.okfn.org> wrote:

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 11:20:20 +0000
> From: Pierre Chrzanowski <pierre.chrzanowski at gmail.com>
> To: open-data-census <open-data-census at lists.okfn.org>
> Cc: "okfn-fr-members at lists.okfn.org" <okfn-fr-members at lists.okfn.org>,
>         "Simon Chignard - data.gouv.fr" <simon at data.gouv.fr>
> Subject: [Open-data-census] Serious inconsistencies in the application
>         of      the methodology
>
> Hi list, I am forwarding a message from Simon Chignard who is concerned
> about the lack of quality and consistency in the current submissions.
>
> I think his feedbacks should be carefully taken into account for the
> reviewing process.
>
> Best
> Pierre
>
> Ps : text below is a Google translate from email wrote in French to okf
> france members list
>
> ---
> Hello all,
>
> I spotted this weekend which seems to me to be serious inconsistencies in
> the application of the methodology of the Open Data Index since 2014. I
> alert you that the question of the reliability of the tool.
>
> 1 / An example: the assessment of open Zipcodes / Postcodes.
>
> Consider the postal code file for Spain, Sweden, Canada and France.
>
> In these four countries, the situation is the same: a more or less public
> operator (Correos, Postnummer, Canada Post and La Poste) sells, on demand,
> the postal code file.
>
> Yet, these are the scores on the same file:
>
> Zipcode / Canada: 55%
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/ca/postcodes
>
> Zipcode / Spain: 45%
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/es/postcodes
>
> Zipcode / France: 10%
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/fr/postcodes
>
> Zipcode / Sweden: 55%
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/se/postcodes
>
>
> 2 / What is at issue
>
> The question posed here is that of chaining or independence criteria.
>
> In France we (collectively) have considered that the criteria chained. This
> means that if the data is not available then we put red all other criteria.
> However, in all other countries I could see they took each criterion
> separately. They consider that given legally sold and closed may still be
> available online, be current, be downloaded in bulk, etc ...
>
> I took the example of Zipcodes but there is the same problem for other
> evaluations, for example here:
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/si/companies
>
> 3 / An assessment that differs between countries
>
> When we look in detail on the evaluation, we also see that the application
> of the criteria is more or less strict.
>
> An example: Zipcode / Slovania: 55%
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/si/postcodes - the commentary states:
> Data is available from Post of Slovenia, purpose is hidden in HTML format,
> not available in bulk and Additional skills are needed to extract it.
> Geodetska uprava (Slovenian equivalent of UK Ordnance Survey) resells bulk
> data with GIS Additional information.
>
> Just scrap the data then it deserves a score of 55%?
>
> One for the road: Finland / Spending: 90%
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/fi/spending - Certain assets data are
> available on Finnish data portal Avoindata.fi. More information from Netra
> Will Be ouvert in the future.
>
> There was clearly a problem for the application of the methodology
> described, for evaluating a current and non-availability "in the future."
>
> 3 / A reviewer who is also the editor for a country
>
> I looked in detail ratings for the Isle of Man, who gets such good scores
> for Government Spending file (100%).
> That evaluation and comment:
> http://global.census.okfn.org/entry/im/spending
>
>
> The proposed link is this one: http://financereports.gov.im - it in no way
> corresponds to the criteria of the methodology.
>
> The problem seems even more serious for this country - and unlike the
> response Mor was Peter - it is one and the same person who proposed the
> evaluation and validated once.
>
> 4 / Why is that a problem?
>
> It was therefore clearly major inconsistencies in how to apply the criteria
> for each country. But if the goal is to produce a ranking of countries -
> not to assess individually), it is a problem. And even a serious problem to
> the extent that 10 places to play close to 10%!
>
> The only solution, to me it seems, is that the OKF can ensure that the
> assessment is consistent for all countries .. if it is the credibility of
> the ranking is questioned.
>
> Simon
>
> PS: also the issue had already been raised in 2012 for the classification
> of W3C
> https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/euopendata/2013-February/001153.html
> - so I do not feel that the only problem is discovered now.
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