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Open Data Legislation How To

Introduction

Many open data implementations are the result of good management and their policies. But any good policy can be modified by a change in management. To make good policy permanent, the policy must be made into a law. The law must cover just enough detail to establish a framework that the open data implementation can be built upon. This provides an how to guide to creating open data legislation.

  • A leadership team that understands technology and transparency, makes creating and establishing a open data policy possible.
  • Many public organizations are reviewing and scoring public open data. PIRG, Truth in Accounting, to name a couple.
  • Quantity of open data is the first step, followed by data quality, and then reliability of the data being available.
  • There are many examples such as Ohio where open data has reduced the number of public records requests. Local governments and their decision makers have real-time access to accurate data information that is displayed in easy-to-use formats.
  • 5 features
    • Easy to use website. Is it intuitive or difficult to figure out?
    • Single pane of glass. One panel or location to find all finance information
    • Common, easy to understand data export formatting, e.g. comma delimited (CSV) and text delimited (TXT) formats
    • Easy to use functionality for entire checkbook datasets. Is the data all similar in presentation and delivery?
    • Data schemes and techniques provided with datasets, e.g. CSV column headers explain the data provided.
  • More transparency creates pressure on neighboring cities and states to provide the same quality services

Attributes of Good Policy

  1. Transparency must be at core of why an open data policy exists. The public's right to know is a fundamental attribute of a modern government. The success of a government can be measured by the public's trust. Transparency of the government's financial data is a baseline for government in today's technology heavy environment.
  2. Set the standard that government data is the public’s data by default. Do not add any restrictions or hurdles that limits the public's ability to freely and autonomously access the government open data. Legal terms of use should be posted, but should not impact public access to the data, e.g. agreeing to the website's terms of use before accessing the data.
  3. When government data may need to be private, involve the public. Review each exception throughly. Allow the public to comment.
  4. Identify existing policy and law that provides overlapping rules for open data in the policy itself. Establish how to work with these overlapping rules. As new policies and/or laws are found to overlap with the open data policy, update the open data policy to eliminate confusion.
  5. Establish accounting fields baseline for common open data reports. As new government organizations join the open data effort, they will need to adopt these baseline account fields. More details on how to work through these conflicts in the Operations section.
  6. Set just enough standards to support common goals between multiple government organizations. Change as little as possible.
  7. Data sets must have well understood field headers. Field headers can also be called metadata. The field headers must be static and not change between releases of data without notification of the changes.
  8. Allow for multiple standard ways to move data between government organizations. Some agencies have limited technical resources. Focus the efforts on getting the data in a common format. Improve data transport with more automation over time.
  9. Open data must be freely accessible by the public in common, in well understood formats. Comma Delimited (CSV) and Tab Delimited (TXT) are the baseline data formats. XLS, JSON, XML, and API are also well accepted formats. More data formats will allow more public individuals and organizations to work with the published data.
  10. Provide attribution to the publishing government organizations.
  11. Set a schedule for publishing open data. There are many systems and organizations that will have limitations on data publishing. Establish that schedule with those organizations for moving data. Work with them to improve frequency. Apply automation to the publishing schedule. As the public begins to expect updated data sets to be available, pressure to keep to the schedule will increase.
  12. Create a relationship with an open data platform such as data.world. Open data platforms will get your data in front of more people that practice data science. As more experts utilize the data available, the feedback quality will improve.

Leadership

  1. Senior leadership must provide aircover for the work
  2. 6-12 months support for startup time
  3. Making the data board real, work through the implementation
  4. Get senators and city officials discussing how this helps them
  5. Questionnaire to legislators
  6. Start holding DataOhio meetings now
  7. Get news to cover

Implementation

  1. The policy has to be proven to work before
  2. Reference DataOhio implementation details in this repo

Operations, Customer Services

  1. details from Ohio Treasury

Legislation

  1. Do not try anything new. Just make permanent the good policy that already has been proven to work.

References

  1. Open Data Initiative, ODI User Story – OhioCheckbook.com: A New National Standard, https://opendatainitiative.github.io/blog/2017-12-18-user-story-ohio-treasury-office/
  2. Sunlight Foundation, Open Data Policy Guidelines, https://sunlightfoundation.com/opendataguidelines/
  3. Open Data Legislation meetings, panel discussion, Next Steps discussion, Ohio Treasury Office meeting, https://opendatainitiative.github.io/events/2018-01-29-ohio-townhall/

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