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

Wed Aug 17 10:14:46 UTC 2011

Hi Julian  and the list,

I think all your contributions are very interesting and I would like to
stress what seems to be a trend in most policies in NZ recently (at least
after MMP) on working collaboratively and in consultation with the
community, which is not seen everywhere.  As a way of introduction, I am a
PhD student doing research on transparency and accountability and one of my
case studies is NZ. I lived over there, did my Masters at VUW,  and I was
fairly impressed with how the country works in terms of transparency and
participation.  I also was engaged in a couple of international cooperation
programmes with NZ and Uruguay.

I was wondering if the fact that New Zealand has around 30 years of
experience with OIA and related policies, made the adoption of these
policies easier, or better understood by  stakeholders than in other places.
Also I was wondering if there was any involvement from the Ombudsman Office,
or if it was mainly driven from the Executive.

Best wishes,

Fabrizio Scrollini

 2011/8/17 Julian Carver <julian.carver at seradigm.co.nz>

>  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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>
>

-- 
Fabrizio Scrollini
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