Mouthwash vs Deathwash

October 1, 2009 – 11:58 am Matt Lane

This is a guest post by Hadyn Green. Hadyn Green is a Senior Analyst in the Ministry of Education’s Research Division. His main area of work is student assessment and he works with data on a daily basis.

At the Open Govt BarCamp held recently, one group was asked to raise their hands if they believed what they read in the newspaper. I was one of only two people who did so. I’m not entirely gullible, but if the paper says “Mr Heatley announced a 20,000 tonne increase in the total allowable catch for Hoki, New Zealand’s largest finfish export” then I believe it. And why not?

Should the paper then report something about research into fish populations showing a reversal of downward trends, then I will be a little more critical.

A while ago came across an article in the Australian Dental Journal on the role of alcohol in oral carcinogenesis with particular reference to alcohol-containing mouthwashes. Or basically, will mouthwash give you oral cancer? With an abstract like that it was bound to end up in the newspaper.

But sadly this was a clear case of poor research (bold mine):

Professor Laurence Walsh, head of the School of Dentistry at the University of Queensland has rejected the claim and said there was no established link between mouthwash and oral cancer. In a letter to the editors of the journal, Professor Walsh criticised the authors of the paper for drawing on a “small and selective group of studies”. “A wide range of critical and systematic reviews over many years have failed to show any statistically significant association between mouthwash use and oral cancer,” he said. “There is certainly nothing in the current paper to change our thinking in that regard.”

I used this example to start a discussion about good research versus bad research called “Mouthwash vs Deathwash”, because, naturally, this is not an isolated case. These Deathwash research reports are constantly found in major newspapers.

But it seems futile to rail against Deathwash research. After all, there will always be “quirky” research reports or “interesting” secondary results discovered in the primary investigation. Moreover there seems to be a poor public perception of research; that any research that shows the status quo is incorrect tends to be more accepted. I call it the “Iguanodon effect” (research is only right until something else comes along, despite whether that’s correct or not).

So if it’s the case now that we see reported poorly researched, non-peer reviewed analysis of information in the media, what’s going to happen if we open up all government information? I suspect you know the answer. And what do we, as public servants, do when the inevitable happens?

We tend to have to be reactionary. To release a statement like “there is no established link between mouthwash and oral cancer” is silly, because nobody would’ve contemplated that there was. But we feel that we have to be ready with that statement ready to go lest the opposite is reported. As such our risk management processes are finely tuned.

With any luck open government data will help. I don’t expect the ratio of Mouthwash to Deathwash analysis to change, but the subsequent critique of them will be easier and faster and done with more regularity. With open data “the truth” can travel around the world just as fast as “the lie”. Of course the truth still takes baggage with it, but it’ll be packed and ready to go.

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By Matt Lane | Posted in Govt 2.0 | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

Measuring the value of data reuse

September 2, 2009 – 2:48 pm Clifton

I went to the Open Government Data barcamp in the weekend, where I starting a discussion on how to measure the value of reusing government held data.

I shared the ways that I had found it had being done overseas:

  • The District of Columbia estimated the cost developing the software that won their reuse of data competition.
  • The European Union estimated the value of the market created through making data available for reuse through a number of estimates:
    • crowdsourcing: data reusers are asked to estimate the market size;
    • turnover: various forms of turnover, less the cost of accessing the data;
    • income: income received by the data reusers;
    • staff: the number of staff employed by the data reusers.

There was a discussion thread around the difficulty of measuring the value of reuse:

  • The secondary and subsequent reusers of data also add value; the total of which may exceed the primary reuser.
  • It is hard to value public good.
  • It is hard to value democratic value - yet democracy requires transparency.
  • Downloads or access are a proxy for demand and hence of value.
  • The cost of collection is relatively easy to calculate and so could be a lower bound of value.

There was another thread of discussion around charging for data:

  • Charging can be a barrier:
    • The cost deters potential reusers.
    • The reuse unit at the agency may impose a minimum quantum of charge to manage its work load and ensure return on effort - thereby creating another barrier. (UK experience)
  • Charging may increase the data quality, as the agency gets rewarded for better quality data

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By Clifton | Posted in Govt 2.0, Participation | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

Draft Open Access and Licensing Framework released

August 27, 2009 – 4:39 pm Keitha Booth

Today the State Services Commission is releasing the draft New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL) (HTML with comments). This document provides guidance for State Services agencies on:

  • open access to non-copyright information; and
  • open licensing of copyright works,

in both cases with a view to allowing their re-use by others. (It does not apply to information or works containing personal or other sensitive information).

The draft NZGOAL sets out a series of policy principles which embrace, among other things, the notions of open access, open licensing, creativity, authenticity, non-discrimination and open formats. It describes the drivers behind this work, the departmental consultation process that has taken place, the Creative Commons New Zealand law licences and sets out a review and release process which agencies can use to determine the basis on which information and copyright works may be released.

This work, which has been prepared in conjunction with the ICT Group of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), was endorsed by public service departments earlier this year when they responded to the Suggested All-of-Government Approach to Licensing of Public Sector Copyright Works: Discussion Paper . This paper and the Summary and Analysis of Departmental Feedback are also being released today to provide further background.

Today’s release is a critical step towards further opening up government’s information and data. It is considered to be a key plank in bringing about creative, social and economic benefits for the people of New Zealand, fostering greater transparency of government performance and making government information and data work for you.

We are publishing the framework as a draft so that it can be road-tested and improved. We want to know what agencies and users have to say about this approach. Have we pitched it right? Are we meeting the needs and interests of those who wish to re-use government information and data? Is anything unclear?  In what additional ways could we help?

Those who read all three documents (the draft NZGOAL, the Discussion Paper and the Summary and Analysis of Departmental Feedback) will see that we have changed our approach slightly from that envisaged in the Discussion Paper and the Summary and Analysis of Departmental Feedback. The main changes are as follows:

  • Rather than adopting what we had referred to as an NZGILF and NZGILF Toolkit, we are now proposing a core framework (the draft NZGOAL) which will be supplemented by guidance notes addressing either specific topics on which further information may be required or issues which arise in practice.
  • A number of topics identified in the Summary and Analysis of Departmental Feedback as being appropriate candidates for the core framework document (the draft NZGOAL) are now more likely to be addressed in separate guidance notes.
  • While, in the Summary and Analysis of Departmental Feedback, we had contemplated a potential place for the Creative Commons Zero tool, we have decided not to advocate its use in NZGOAL. Suggesting to agencies that they consider waiving Crown copyright or other copyright in their copyright works (which would be the effect of advocating Creative Commons Zero) would raise a miscellany of policy and legal issues that are beyond the scope of NZGOAL. Moreover, we do not consider the use of Creative Commons Zero to be necessary.

SSC and DIA are also mindful that the current copyright standard in the New Zealand Government Web Standards will need to be updated. We have that in our sights.

Please join this discussion. The last day for receiving comment will be Friday 9 October 2009.  You can add a comment to this post, the sections of the draft NZGOAL, and/or email your comments directly to nzgoal@ssc.govt.nz if you wish.

So far as copyright works are concerned, NZGOAL proposes that agencies apply the most liberal of the New Zealand Creative Commons law licences to those of their copyright works that are appropriate for release, unless there is a restriction which would prevent this. The most liberal Creative Commons licence is the Attribution (BY) licence. So far as non-copyright information is concerned, NZGOAL recommends the use of clear “no-known rights” statements, to provide certainty for people wishing to re-use that information.

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By Keitha Booth | Posted in Guidance | Tagged , , , , | Comments (55)

Exposing non-personal data in new ways

August 3, 2009 – 5:39 pm Keitha Booth

As many readers of this blog will know, SSC has been pursuing various work-streams under the rubric of the Open Government Information and Data Re-use work Project. It is continuing to do so in collaboration with, among others, the ICT Group at the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA).

One of the many issues we’ve encountered along the way is the perception that wider government has not released many useful datasets, databases and other information resources. While we appreciate that much work still needs to be done (and is being done) in this space, we thought it might be helpful to provide the public with a list of just some of the datasets, databases and other information resources that are already available online, usually on the websites of their source agencies.

We’ve collated a list of links to a number of dataset, database and other information resources from a subset of departments (and other agencies) and are releasing that list by way of an Excel spreadsheet, a .csv file, and an Atom feed (which, as many will know, is one of a number of different types of structured, machine-readable feeds and the type that SSC recommends for use by government).

This list has been collated from details provided by government agencies working with the SSC and DIA on the Open Government Information and Data Re-use work programme.  It is not a complete list and does not include data from agencies such as the Ministry for the Environment, NIWA and Landcare Research which are leaders in opening up their data.  We see the list as illustrating the vast continuum of government online data already currently available.
A small seedling emerging from soil. Image by realblades
We are publishing this spreadsheet and feed as a small first step towards opening up non-personal New Zealand government data in new ways. We also see this approach as a proof of concept in SSC and DIA’s work in developing Government’s approach to opening up non-personal New Zealand government data.

As we recognise that this information has been published in a range of presentation formats and with differing use rights, the spreadsheet and feed include an agency contact who will assist with any queries from users.

They also list the dataset name, agency, online address, licence arrangements if known, and usage details if known.  Please note that the data links to its agency’s website which will have a copyright ownership statement.  It will be necessary to contact the agency to agree licensing arrangements if there is no clear statement on the website.

This work is a precursor to a formal release later this year of a New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework (NZGOALF) which will provide guidance for agencies and the public on the use of the Creative Commons suite of New Zealand Law licences across the New Zealand State Services.  We will be at the NZ Open Govt Data Barcamp/Hackfest to discuss this work.

We are also working to incorporate the Open Government Data principles into our work, to the extent that they are appropriate for the New Zealand environment, but within the context of New Zealand’s copyright law.
 
We see the release of government-held data as a necessary but not sufficient step for both the community and government to reap the benefits of re-using it to create social and economic growth for New Zealanders and the economy. Therefore our work will also continue to look at making it easier to find and reuse government-held data and information.
 
We expect that there will be strong interest in this release, particularly from the laudable community which has set up the Open Data Catalogue.  We encourage you to use this feed and also want your comment on our approach and on this data. Is this a helpful way to release/expose open government data? Please tell us if there is a better way.

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By Keitha Booth | Posted in Govt 2.0, Participation | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (14)

NZ Open Govt Data Barcamp/Hackfest

July 31, 2009 – 9:00 am Matt Lane

In my earlier post, A wizard behind a curtain, we celebrated an early step in an age of value being added to Government information. Days later, an article was published which better articulated what I hoped was beginning for New Zealand Government:

“These innovations are not primarily creatures of government or the marketplace. They represent a new “commons sector” — a realm of collective wealth generated by ordinary people through their own resourcefulness and sharing, largely outside of the money economy.”

-David Bollier

Many wizards mobilise

Back in February, we hosted a workshop here at the Commission on Perspectives on Open Data: Re-use of Government-held Non-personal Data.

Stemming from this workshop Nat Torkington (a panellist from the workshop) and Glen Barnes (an attendee from the workshop) launched Open New Zealand, which includes the Open Data Catalogue “an open, independent catalogue of Government and Local Body datasets” and the Open Government Ninjas Forum. Many other workshop attendees have also been involved, as well as other ninjas/wizards/ninja-wizards who were not at the workshop.

Members of the Open Government Ninjas are organising  NZ Open Govt Data Barcamp/Hackfest for the weekend of August 29 (which was mentioned in the NZ Herald):

Google Groups
NZ Open Govt Data Barcamp and Hackfest
Visit this group

“The New Zealand Open Government Bar Camp is an “unconference” for people who are interested in making government-held data more freely available for others to re-use. An “unconference” is an alternative participant-driven event, that avoids aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

Web 2.0 developments have shown the potential of combining data from different sources made freely available on the Internet. The government holds a huge range of non-personal data which could form the basis of innovative services and applications by others on the Internet.

You should come if you are interested in government information policy, explore ways to provide data, making entrepreneurial use of the Internet, or building working applications during a weekend.”

Add this event to your calendar

Keitha Booth, Clifton Chan, Vikram Kumar, Jason Ryan and myself will be eagerly in attendance, and we encourage others to join us.

Keeping up with Open Government and Open Data conversations

To make the task of keeping up with the multiple conversations now happening across Twitter, the Ninjas’ Forum, the Google Group, and other miscellaneous media I have created a Yahoo Pipe that aggregates this content (the Pipe is located at http://tr.im/uvrS where there are also embedding instructions. Alternatively, if you use an RSS aggregator, you can simply subscribe to the wedfeed):

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By Matt Lane | Posted in Govt 2.0, Participation | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Worldwide Governance Indicators

July 13, 2009 – 4:04 pm Beith Atkinson

The New Zealand media has shown no interest in the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) published in June 2009 by the World Bank. This is surprising as a contributor from the Brookings Institute observed that:

“the all mighty countries in the G-8 are not the models of good governance; instead the Nordics and New Zealand are…”

The WGI measures six dimensions of governance:

  • Voice and Accountability,
  • Political Stability and Absence of Violence,
  • Government Effectiveness,
  • Regulatory Quality,
  • Rule of Law, and
  • Control of Corruption.

What is heartening is that New Zealand remains in the top ten ratings on all dimensions – (Sweden is the only other country in the top ten for all dimensions).  The New Zealand ratings range from 4th for Control of Corruption  to 10th for Government Effectiveness

The new WGI covering 212 countries is based on 35 different data sources, aggregating data from hundreds of disaggregated questions posed to tens of thousands respondents around the world.

The crux of President Obama’s speech to the Parliament in Ghana last week was that Governance is important if the problems of Africa are to be remedied.

On the WGI you can see that poor countries do not have to be poorly governed.  Botswana stands out when compared with its neighbours.

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By Beith Atkinson | Posted in Integrity & Conduct, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Pandemic planning… so where are the plans?

July 3, 2009 – 9:00 am Nick Mason

It’s the nature of pandemics… dealing with the unknown, on the fly, moving with the changing scenarios, making sure advice is accurate, robust, and up to date.

The State Services Commission (SSC) has a role in leading the Public Service and wider State sector during a pandemic. Our responsibilities are to provide advice on employment relations and help ensure that the Public Service and other essential services are able to keep delivering necessary services to the public.

So how has the SSC dealt with this? And how well have we done?

The last time the State Services faced a global pandemic was when bird flu came on the scene in 2004.

Since Novel A H1N1 09 virus infection (swine flu) reared its head the process has gone something like this:

  1. Dig out SSC Pandemic guidelines for bird flu on the website. Take calls from agencies that need employment relations information updated now. Aim to make it simpler, easier to understand, more logical and ‘step by step’, and give outlines and share the principles rather than the details.
  2. Take advice from the Ministry of Health, as the lead agency, and remove all health related information from our website. Because of the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic, channel all health related questions to the Ministry of Health website to ensure consistent health advice under constantly changing conditions.
  3. Take advice from the Crown Law office to ensure the legal rights of both public sector employers, and their employees, are considered and included.
  4. Liaise with the Department of Labour to ensure SSC advice and Department of Labour advice dovetail in to each other
  5. Informed the Minister of State Services, who -happily- is also the Minister of Health, about the advice.
  6. We continue to advise, work with and support agencies. We are committed to ensure a smooth flow of information as the scenario changes and advice is updated.

So how have we done? Please let us know what you think about SSC’s updated pandemic planning advice and any questions you have. And feel free to pass this on to anyone else you think would be interested in the topic.

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By Nick Mason | Posted in Guidance | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

An introduction and a goodbye

June 19, 2009 – 4:21 pm Joanna

I have two things to talk about in this blog post.

1. You’ve been waiting a long time  since I first presented about government use of SMS , and now finally, I am very excited to be able to provide you with An Introduction to Government Use of SMS.  You can read it in full at the e-initiatives wiki (viewable only to those working from an NZ government IP), and add your own case studies (please), or you can download a printable version of the Introduction (PDF 192 KB). You can also read it in a slightly different and abbreviated form on the webstandards website.

I hope that as more agencies start to use SMS, they’ll share their experiences - both good and bad. Remember that if you’re spending public money and you mess up, if you share that lesson far and wide, you’re going to spread the cost of that failure too. As you’ll see in the next paragraph (spoiler alert!) I won’t be at the Commission to talk to you about SMS anymore, but my colleague Matt Lane will be, so if you have any questions, please email him. And/or also get in contact with Victoria University, who have a project named Effective Electronic Records Management in the 21st Century - the project is led by Professor Miriam Lips with research activities by Anita Rapson and Tony Hooper and you can email Anita on Anita.Rapson@vuw.ac.nz

2. As I mentioned above, from June 30 I will no longer be working at the Commission because my role has been disestablished. I would like to thank you all for reading and supporting this blog, which was the first big project that I undertook here at the SSC. I’d also like to thank all the contributors, especially Matt for his neverending enthusiasm, Richard Best for his amazing work on the contributor guidelines and sticky legal stuff, and the much-missed Laurence Millar for championing the project. I think it is vitally important that government opens up communication channels like this, and I hope that work will continue. I know that the blog is in safe hands with Matt in charge. I’d also like to thank the internet community in general for all the amazing feedback I got after my GOVIS presentation ‘Same Time, Different Channel’ which was essentially a summing up of everything I’ve done in my time at the SSC- it means an awful lot for me to be able to leave on such a high note. And of course, I believe in public/government participation, and the existence of the internet means I’m not really ever going to go away. See you at the next e-govt barcamp, no doubt…

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By Joanna | Posted in Govt 2.0, Guidance, Participation, research | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Building websites in 24 hours

May 19, 2009 – 4:05 pm Joanna

I don’t think it is controversial to say that when you work in government, you need to get used to things taking a while to happen. After all, having 4 million clients means a lot of accountability. That’s why it was so refreshing for me last week to be a volunteer at Full Code Press (on my own dime, and representing myself, not the State Services Commission).

FullCodePress was held, live at the CeBIT 09 conference in Sydney on 12-13 May. An Australian web team took on a New Zealand web team to build a complete website in 24 hours. Two non-profit organisations were selected to receive a complete website at the end of the 24 hours. New Zealand won the FullCodePress 2009 challenge!

Really though, the two winners were the non-profit organisations Rainbow Youth and the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre who each got fantastic websites built for them. And I got to feel like a winner too, for being involved with such a fantastic event, and because of how much I learnt from the competitors and the judges about what is required to make a site good. 

What struck me the most about the event was the role that social media played to expand Full Code Press beyond the two teams who were physically at the event. As a volunteer I was blogging and twittering from behind the scenes, which allowed people at home to follow along with what was going on. Although I was supposed to be impartial-ish, it was fantastic to see the support the New Zealand team the Code Blacks got on twitter, including a large number of people who changed their icons:

fcp twitter    

It really made the world seem a little smaller, and it’s really interesting to keep checking the #fcp09 tag on Twitter, and see for instance, that Courtney from the Code Blacks (who also has a fascinating but unrelated twitter feed from the National Library) is still editing the content of the Rainbow Youth site, because she’s such a professional. I love that an event can be so inspirational to professionals who are at the top of their game, and I love that it can produce such great results. But I’m wondering - does it take a cross-Tasman competition to get people to work for a charity, or is there something that we could all do in our daily lives that would both challenge us and help others? Is there something that government could do via the use of new technologies to make it easier for charities to reap the benefits of crowd-sourcing? How about crowd-sourcing to improve government services and sites as well?  

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By Joanna | Posted in Participation | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Satisfaction with government’s online services

May 15, 2009 – 5:42 pm Vikram Kumar

Providing services online, done well, benefits both people and government.

Individuals, professionals, businesses, etc. who choose to use government’s online services benefit from “anytime, anywhere” access to government services. Agencies benefit by freeing up their frontline service delivery staff. Instead of routine transactions, staff can spend more time on complex, high-touch cases that enables both more effective and efficient services.

Yet, looking around in New Zealand, it seems that we’ve barely scratched the surface. In many ways, the potential from government’s online services to benefit both people and government lies untapped. Looking overseas, for example the Australian Excellence in e-Government Award, the breadth and usefulness of online services introduced each year seems impressive.

Can we do better?

One of the first steps is to get a better assessment of where we are. In the past, there have been some qualitative studies done by the State Services Commission as well as the New Zealanders Experience Research programme, which includes Kiwis Count. However, a missing piece has been a more quantitative understanding of online services at an all-of-government level.

Late last year the State Services Commission therefore undertook such a study and has today published the results online- Kiwis & Government Online Survey (2008). This survey provides an indication of respondents’ satisfaction with government’s online services, in particular those that are comfortable using the Internet to access government’s services.

The survey also looks at respondents’ perceptions of various other aspects of online services, including channel preference and their ideas on better promoting government’s online services.

There are numerous insights in the survey but there are two that stood out for me.

First, the most important aspect for respondents transacting with government online is that their privacy is protected. At the same time, it is also the aspect that they most agreed with as being true about their perceptions of transacting online with government. This means that protection of privacy when transacting online with government represents a congruence of importance and perceptions- a very good result for both people and government.

Second, for slightly more than half the respondents (54%), emails were the preferred way for agencies to get in touch with them routinely. While emails to contact an agency are clearly not a preference, getting emails from agencies seems to be favoured by many.

There are many more interesting findings. Have a look at the survey and let us know what you think.

By Vikram Kumar | Posted in News, Strategy, research | Comments (0)