Open Government Data Consultation Launched

The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, has opened consultation on the government’s open data plans.

Following last week’s first meeting of the new Public Sector Transparency Board, the minister invited opinion on the principles for implementing the government’s transparency commitments across the public sector, as one of its first agreed priorities.

Since part of the Board’s remit is to engage with developers, open data experts and business on how transparency should be implemented, the Board has decided to publish a first draft immediately for comment and improvement.

They include commitments to publish public data under the same open licence that enables free reuse, including commercial reuse, using open standards and following the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); as well as a public body mandate to maintain and publish data holding inventories.

Putting data access at the heart of public sector

The draft principles have been published on data.gov.uk, the government website launched to support open citizen data-sharing projects, where anyone can leave comments.

While the data website was established by the last Labour government, the new coalition government has taken up its cause, publishing a new range of data sets recently.

The Conservative Party had also put data access at the heart of its ‘open government’ technology manifesto pledges.

Referring to the recent data set releases, Maude said: “But we don’t want this to be about a few releases, we want transparency to become an absolutely core part of every bit of government business. That is why we have asked some of the country’s and the world’s greatest experts in this field to help us take this work forward quickly here in central government and across the whole of the public sector.”

The Transparency Board was set up by the Prime Minister on 1 June to drive forward the government’s transparency agenda, and is made up of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt from Southampton University, Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety, and Dr Rufus Pollock from Cambridge University, an economist who helped found the non-profit Open Knowledge Foundation.

The Board is tasked with making the transparency principles a core part of all government business and ensure that all Whitehall departments meet new tight deadlines set for releasing key public datasets.

In addition, it is responsible for setting open data standards across the whole public sector, including the opening up of the most needed data sets.