Post: 24 February 2014
On Friday the Cabinet Office announced the award of £1.5 million in funding to support organisations who want to improve their data publication.
This is the first round of funding from the Release of Data fund. The announcement includes a list of eight proposals covered by the funding allocation.
The announcement is short on detail and I was initially somewhat confused by it. As far as I can tell this is the first time the Government has made any public mention of a “Release of Data fund”, at least by that name.
According to the Cabinet Office, the Open Data User Group (ODUG) will collect bids for future rounds of funding. Chair Heather Savory said in a tweet on Friday that the ODUG had considered over 40 bids for the first round.
While I don’t wish to suggest the Cabinet Office’s transparency policy is less than fully transparent, it would be useful to have clearer communication of: what funding is available to support open data release, how organisations should apply for that funding, and what the criteria are for prioritising and allocating the funding.
I’ve made a few inquiries myself and trawled through some past statements from the Cabinet Office and other departments. I gather the Cabinet Office may shortly release more detail about the allocations announced on Friday. However following is the position on open data funding as I currently understand it.
Origins of the Release of Data Fund
The £1.5 million announced on Friday is not new money. It is part of a £7 million fund first announced by BIS in March 2012.
The original intention was that this £7 million fund would be available from April 2013 for the new Data Strategy Board (DSB) to “purchase additional data for free release from the Trading Funds and potentially other public sector organisations”.
According to its terms of reference the DSB would advise the Government on “additional £7m expenditure in this Spending Review period for the purchase of additional data for free release”. The ODUG was to draw on expertise from the user community to help the DSB build the business case for allocation of the £7 million.
Open data prioritised for release would be sourced “primarily” from the member organisations of the Public Data Group (the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Companies House) but the ODUG would be free to advise on the release of data from other public sector organisations.
A process was set up on Data.gov.uk so that the public could make requests to the Government via the ODUG for release of specific datasets.
However the Data Strategy Board only lasted a year and was wound up in June 2013, apparently without allocating any of the £7 million. Some members of the DSB joined the Public Sector Transparency Board (PSTB).
Ministers confirmed in December 2013 that the fund previously managed by the DSB had been transferred to the PSTB, and that the purpose of the fund was still for the Government to “purchase additional data for free release, based on business cases put forward by the Open Data User Group.”
Other Open Data Investments
In December 2012 ministers from the Cabinet Office and BIS announced two additional investments:
In a separate announcement the same week BIS announced £1.1 million funding (over two years) for Innovation Vouchers to help small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) who want to “use public open data to commercialise their ideas and develop products and prototypes.”
An application form and guidance for the Breakthrough Fund were published in May 2013. A press release from the LGA in December 2013 indicates £1 million of the Breakthrough Fund had been earmarked for applications from local government.
The Open Data Immersion Programme was launched in February 2013 under the auspices of the Open Data Institute. (This appears to be in addition to the £10 million over five years the ODI is receiving from the UK Government via the Technology Strategy Board.) The ODI’s Open Data Challenge Series is part of the Immersion Programme.
Applications for Innovation Vouchers are via the Technology Strategy Board or the ODI. The TSB has published data on the first round of voucher grants, though it is difficult to separate the open data projects from other themes. The second round is currently open.
In December 2013 these investments were described by ministers as follows:
which suggests basically the same range of activities but either some vagueness or a reallocation of funds between those activities.
The Release of Data Fund Allocation
These are the eight proposals to benefit from the £1.5 million awarded in Friday’s announcement:
1. Local Government Association Voucher Scheme - “Proposal to unlock open data from local authorities by offering open data training vouchers for 1 data set, and cash for 3 data sets. Proposal will allow local authority data to be made available.”
This proposal appears to be independent of funding available to individual councils from the Breakthrough Fund. The announcement indicates three of the datasets will relate to public conveniences, gritting and planning. The fourth dataset may be Rights of Way, but that’s speculation.
There’s some coverage indicating this proposal is about creating a “consistent set of methodologies” for release of the data, which rather dampens my expectations.
Side note: The Great British Public Toilet Map currently has funding from Nominet Trust to collect and generate open data on public conveniences.
2. Leeds Data Mill - “Proposal for Leeds Council to create a hub for data to support citizens by making data about public services freely available. Funding for future stages will be reviewed in due course.”
Leeds Data Mill is a project led by Mark Barrett, co-founder of Leeds Data Thing. I should think this proposal either involves Leeds Data Mill creating a hub for Leeds Council or the Council publishing datasets via Leeds Data Mill.
3. Legislative Openness - “Proposal to make Department of Work and Pensions legislative data downloadable as bulk data. Proposal will bring UK in line with best practice on the Open Data Census.”
I’m dubious about this one. Is this the DWP Law Volumes currently online as PDFs? Late last year DWP stopped updating those volumes in expectation that the information would be transferred to Legislation.gov.uk, but Legislation.gov.uk seems to be running behind.
Publishing legislation is part of the normal business of government. Is the bulk data angle just an excuse to dip into the open data funding to do something the Government would have to do anyway?
According to the Open Data Census the UK’s normal body of legislation is not yet available as bulk data, so it’s unclear why the DWP part requires separate or special funding.
4. Data Issue Tracker - “Proposal to implement a strong reporting mechanism into DGUK and other websites to allow issues with broken links to be reported and fixed. This proposal is expected to drive down data requests by 30%.”
I could write a whole post about this idea. It’s a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with how the DGUK catalogue is managed; a technological approach that fits the skill set of the DGUK team but doesn’t get at the root of the problem.
(Broken links are not responsible for anywhere near 30% of data requests. A small number of complaints about broken links have gone into the request process because prior to November the data request link was on the site’s homepage and there was no other obvious means to contact DGUK administrators. Now that the request form is less noticeable those requests will have dropped off.)
5. Local Data Census - “Proposal is a survey of the availability of open data at local and city level across the UK. Project will allow analysis of available data sets and identification of areas lacking data.”
This is a useful OKFN project, announced earlier this month.
6. Open Data Training for public servants - “Data courses to be provided for public servants. This proposal will improve skill levels at handling data within the civil service, and will contribute towards a culture change towards being open by default.”
7. Open data procurement training - “Proposal to develop a range of materials, training and support about open data for all those involved with public procurement.”
These two proposals are described in a bit more detail in a post from the Open Data Institute. Funding for training of public servants is £50k and funding for procurement training is £100k.
8. Housing Big Data - Proposal to create anonymised open data extracts of Housing Association data. This will help inform the social housing sector and derive significant benefits.
This is presumably for HACT's Housing Big Data project, which has previously received £50k in funding from Nominet Trust.
Comments and Questions
The two ODI proposals received £150,000 in total but we don’t yet know how much each of the other six proposals has been allocated. The average would be £225,000 but I expect the funding is weighted heavily towards one or two of the proposals.
It’s unclear exactly who controls the fund itself at this point. The PSTB is chaired by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, so there may be no distinction to draw there. However I’ve also heard the funding talked about as if the ODUG has ownership. Again that may not be a meaningful distinction; the ODUG nominally represents the user community but membership is approved by the Cabinet Office.
A more important question is how the process of collecting bids for funding and approving allocations is managed. There does not seem to have been any open call for bids, or any published criteria.
If the proposals were all from public authorities we could assume some internal process – but that does not seem to be the case. The ODUG has no obvious public point of contact. Surely the bids are not being solicited simply through informal networks?
As originally conceived, the £7 million DSB fund announced in March 2012 was for purchasing the release of data, mainly from BIS trading funds. We can see now this was never very plausible, for two reasons:
First, under current political control BIS is rabidly opposed to significant open data release of Public Data Group assets because that would depreciate their value in advance of privatisation.
Second, the £7 million is only available over the current Spending Review period. The funding would not stretch very far as compensation for loss of revenue from open data release of the big, important datasets.
If the first-round allocations are representative, the criteria for expenditure have changed radically since 2012. To a large extent they seem to duplicate the criteria for the separate Breakthrough Fund.
Some of the first-round proposals are intended to facilitate new releases of open data. However priorities seem to be disconnected from the data request process that was set up to feed the funding process as originally conceived.
This set of proposals is about housekeeping issues and troubleshooting technical barriers to release of datasets. Individually most of the proposals are worthwhile. However collectively they represent an unambitious direction of travel.
Friday’s announcement seems to be an admission that the Cabinet Office’s ability to drive the open data agenda across government is no match for BIS’s hidebound protectionism.
The Government is still evading what should be the main priority: open data release of core reference datasets held by the PDG trading funds (and by other information traders such as the Environment Agency and BGS).
Follow-up post with update, 2 April 2014: How open is the Cabinet Office’s open data funding programme?
Photo credits: Open Data stickers by Jonathan Gray, CC0 1.0; Money by Images of Money, CC BY 2.0; hilariously bad photomontage by me.