[open-government] New Zealand Government releases Declaration on Open and Transparent Government, and new Data and Information Management Principles

Tue Aug 16 23:27:05 UTC 2011

Javier, Tim, thanks for your questions.

Tim McNamara has explained most of what's happened in NZ, but I'll add a few
points.

By way of introduction I'm an independent consultant, and an active member
of OpenNZ. I was engaged by the govt to work with the secretariat of the
Data & Information Reuse work programme to draft the Principles, the
Declaration, and the supporting Cabinet paper and case studies, as an open
and collaborative process involving govt officials and the open data
community.
The macro economic context here is a country that avoided the worst ravages
of the global financial crisis (none of our banks got in trouble), but to
keep the economy growing the government's gone from a decade of surpluses,
to moderate deficits since 2008.

That's combined with a shift nearly 3 years ago from a centre left to a
centre right government. Along with that there's been a general imperative
and trend towards reducing the number of people employed by government. This
isn't a sweeping and rapid set of deep cuts like those recently in the UK,
it's a more gradual process that's been going for three years. The
intervention logic is around back office consolidation (merging agencies,
using shared IT infrastructure), while retaining front line service delivery
(in person, and electronically). This is essentially a paradigm of
increasing efficiency.
The order the benefits of "targeted release of government's high value data"
are listed in the Cabinet paper[1] is fairly telling (see paragraph 35).
This builds on 'drivers for open data' work we did last year in the #nzdata
process where we worked through ways to prioritise datasets for release. In
that we listed the drivers or benefits in order of:

   1. Efficiency – reducing the cost of government service delivery and
   policy development
   2. Value Creation – enabling people outside government to create useful
   tools and services that deliver commercial/economic, social and
   environmental benefits
   3. Transparency – building trust in government and increasing citizen
   participation in democracy

In the Cabinet paper you can see the thinking has evolved further, and that
the order is now broadly:

   - Economic growth and value creation
   - Improving the quality of policy development (through expert insights
   into supporting data, and improving external engagement)
   - Efficiency of the public sector
   - Trust in government (by increasing transparency)

As Tim McNamara says, transparency is important in NZ, and the bar that
government has to reach is rising, but it's not the number one focus as
we've always done pretty well on that front. Value creation and efficiency
are seen as more important. That's what leads us to the notion of 'high
value data'. If it takes additional resources to release data (at least
until it's so baked into process and new systems as to be almost
effortless), then we have to prioritise (regardless actually of whether the
value is directly economic, social, environmental or via a second order
effect on those outcomes caused by a more functional civil society through
transparency).
Rather than prioritising in detail from the parliament down, agencies are
tasked with working out what will deliver value. This is broadly to be done
through experimentation and feedback, planning/prediction of benefits where
possible, the recognition that we're also after serendipitous benefits that
we can't predict in advance, and by using demand for data as a proxy.
There's a real 'no one size fits all' approach given differences between
agencies, and a 'learn by doing' and 'share that learning with others'
emphasis.

Hopefully through this 'agile' approach, and through the need to continously
demonstrate the value that is created, (through case studies and other
measures to be determined), we'll be able to deliver and build on all of the
above benefits.

Regards how Treasury and others were convinced, we were lucky enough to have
a Minister of Finance who strongly believes in the economic value creation
potential of open data, and the potential benefits of getting policy
development more data driven and evidence based. We also had some solid work
done in 2008 on the economic benefits of open access to geospatial data[2],
and an entrepreneurial open data community that have already started to
demonstrate economic value from apps that reuse government data[3].

Julian

[1]
http://www.ict.govt.nz/library/Public-version-of-Open-Government%20-Cabinet-paper.pdf
[2] http://www.geospatial.govt.nz/productivityreport/
[3] See the case studies at
http://wiki.open.org.nz/Open_Data_Mini_Case_Studies
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