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Data Sharing- How to Break Down the Historic Barriers

Page history last edited by Lucas Cioffi 13 years, 10 months ago

This session took place during the May 24th OpenGov Community Summit hosted by the Department of the Treasury.

Please add your notes below.

Session Notes

  • Agencies should acknowledge that sharing data has value for the agency itself, not just data users. It's a way to convey its mission and increase citizens' awareness of and support for that mission. 
  • Data sharing can be pitched as a way to get people and agencies to do what they should have been doing all along--improving processes, finding new approaches, enhancing data quality.
  • It can also be promoted as a potential cost saving mechanism. Providing data electronically reduces physical delivery costs, but can also enable customer self-service. 
  • Technology is rarely a barrier as it was 10 years ago. The software and methods exist; the resistance is more cultural and process-oriented, with human time being the gating factor.
  • Directives about what to release shouldn't come from the top (the president, e.g.) down. Data users are in the best position to say what data is of interesting to them. Agencies should also be empowered to discover for themselves what valuable data they possess.
  • The Department of Transportation has a scoring system it will share with the group. The system weights data value most heavily, so the scales are always tipped in favor of releasing data. 
  • Privacy is a legitimate concern, especially when different data sets can be combined to reveal more than a single data steward intended. In these cases, it may be better to release summarized data. 
  • For nervous organizations, low-risk data sets can be shared first.
  • Likewise, it's very useful for an agency to inventory its data. An inventory is not a commitment to share.
  • There's an impulse at some agencies to hunker down and wait for the next administration and hope that data sharing requirements will just go away. However, once the public has access to data it's going to be difficult to withdraw. Openness and transparency should also be a general government principle, not tied to any political party.
  • If you simply throw a bunch of raw data on data.gov, citizens won't necessarily be able to derive value from it. You need to do marketing, especially to constituencies that have a natural interest in it. You should also explain it in straightforward language, provide support for users, and perhaps give examples of how it can be used.
  • Agencies should establish an "open government office" with full- or part-time staff assigned. Without that, data sharing remains an "unfunded mandate" and it will be difficult to get attention, especially from IT.
  • IT is often extremely busy and unwilling to take on new projects. However, IT is not the data owner. Data owners should have the authority to decide whether to release data.

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