We have increasingly factored aspects of Web 2.0 into our daily lives - it is no longer an emerging phenomenon.
Podcasts or RSS feeds are innovative and new ways of transmitting/receiving information. They allow the individual New Zealander to create a personalised view of the world, and are an effective way of keeping in touch with particular interests, as well as time shifting - you can read, listen or watch when and where you want, rather than when and where the publisher of the information wants you to.
They are components of the new world of co-creation envisaged by Tim O’Reilly when he first coined the term Web 2.0. Earlier this year, Tim commented “What if you don’t think of what you produce as the “final product” but rather as a step in an information pipeline, what do you do differently to add value for downstream consumers? For me, this is the true innovation in Web 2.0, creating something new, or adding to work that has been created by others in the same way that Open Source software or Wikipedia creates knowledge through the effort of literally hundreds or thousands of people operating separately. For an example, look at how www.theyworkforyou.co.nz adds value to information sourced from Parliament.
So what is the underlying structural shift that has taken place? It is well described in The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, who takes his own medicine, publishing on line under a Creative Commons license. While the content can be heavy going, it does describe the nature of the change that we are living through – the economics of social production are dramatically different. Or closer to home: “While social networking and user generated content need to be taken into account … more importantly we need to look at the how the small loosely coupled applications sharing common data handling standards are transforming the web in front of our eyes.”
What does this mean for government? It means that we must be ready and prepared to provide our information in a way that it can be enhanced and developed by others - using meta tags and microformats. It means we must be willing to participate in discussions where we are not speaking with the sole authoritative voice – using electronic tools to develop a collective consensus that is greater than the sum of the parts. It means we must create our content so that it is mashable by other government sites and non-government sites. It means allowing constituents to tag their own content. It means managing blogs and wikis that New Zealanders participate in and contribute to.
We are yet to adjust government information and services to Web 2.0, which is now almost four years old. The next wave of change – mobile devices, Twitter, always-on connection from anywhere, access to my personal information portfolio – will be the next step up. As Tara Hunt says “Imagine this”.
So we need to increase the urgency with which we apply Web 2.0 to government - open up our content, expose our data so that it is easier to consume, rather than applying resources to redesign information dissemination. By creating objects that others can assemble we are likely to be significantly more successful at ensuring New Zealanders have access to the government information when, where and how they prefer.
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In response to seeing an article about how nearly half of US citizens are distrusting of a 2-party system, I wrote earlier that while the Democrats and Republicans are working hard to leverage the power of the Internet for party platform gains, they might soon be facing a threat to the system status quo due to the break-down of top-bottom interactions. It is an interesting possibility here, especially considering the potential rise of Libertarian party candidates and beliefs over the past year (in response to government surveillance, interventionism, etc.)
It’s great to see Laurence so strongly advocating the opening up and exposing of data. This is a right-now opportunity for a dramatic change to how Government publishes information and how the public accesses it. ‘Locking up’ information in web sites will be judged poorly by history.
There is a new New Zealand Government Feed Standard under consultation at
http://research.elabs.govt.nz/nz-govt-feed-standard/
…and a presentation Feeds for Thought giving a semi-technical view of the bottlenecks and opportunities of feeds at
http://research.elabs.govt.nz/feeds-for-thought/
(full post is on my blog - http://www.rediguana.co.nz/gav/2008/07/29/ssc-as-the-catalyst/)
Laurence Millar, the Chief Information Officer for the NZ Government recently blogged about some thoughts around government data and Web 2.0. It is exciting to see someone in such a position of influence raise these issues, and hopefully lead the charge to promote change in government agency practices.
One angle I would like to extend upon, is Tim O’Reilly’s quote.
What if you don’t think of what you produce as the “final product” but rather as a step in an information pipeline, what do you do differently to add value for downstream consumers?
I think that this is a fundamental point that Government needs to get to grips with. When you look at government websites these days, most of them are designed around the philosophy of being just the terminal point of an information production chain - the result being information products expressed entirely in the form that the government agency ‘expects’ citizens to digest them. Most Government websites therefore only produce web pages, and pdf documents - they contain relatively little in raw data in a format that is more accessible for citizens. The exceptions of course are those agencies that have extensive mandates for publishing vast datasets such as Statistics New Zealand and Land Information New Zealand.
Laurence concludes his post with absolutely the correct next action required
…open up our content, expose our data so that it is easier to consume, rather than applying resources to redesign information dissemination. By creating objects that others can assemble we are likely to be significantly more successful at ensuring New Zealanders have access to the government information when, where and how they prefer.
A classic example is the recently released Atlas of Socioeconomic Deprivation in New Zealand (NZDep2006) published by the Ministry of Health. Whilst it contains a wealth of data, all of the downloadable forms from the website have been constricted by their publication in a read-only pdf format. The multitude of maps are all pdfs. The tables and reference information are in pdfs. This makes it near impossible to extract and utilise the data “when, where and how they prefer“. All is not lost however, I did contact MOH and they did provide a CD with a couple of hundreds MBs of data, including shapefiles for use within Geographical Information Systems. However, the licensing of the data is still somewhat unclear - Crown Copyright is not ideal terms, for example, to enable the republishing of the data by uploading it to a geospatial data hub such as Koordinates. What I mean to say is that it doesn’t allow automatic republishing without having to clarify conditions of use with the agency, in this case Health. If it were released under Creative Commons, then this would greatly speed the republication and disitrbution of the data. So, whilst the NZDep2006 data has been released, it is really not yet ready in prime time for wider Web 2.0 use.
This has also been replicated with Health’s Atlas of New Zealand’s District Health Boards. Using pdf’s to provide spatial data is admirable, but in this day of Google Maps or Earth - surely Government should be considering publishing data as KMZ’s or even live network services that can be loaded dynamically into a far richer and intuitive client than Adobe Acrobat.
Coming back to my point, SSC is certainly making all the right noises about where we should be going. However, right now, it appears to be left up to individuals like myself to actually go to agencies and say - “Hey, we’d actually like access to this data in a more reasonable format”.
What I would like to see is a mechanism whereby individuals such as myself, can instead approach SSC with a request to an agency, and the SSC will actually engage said agency to ensure agencies make said data available in a consistent manner across government.
I’m sure agencies would stand up and listen to someone making a request on behald of the Government CIO instead of a lone citizen or three. It would also mean that a consistent playbook could be promoted (Government Geospatial Information Web Access Guideline) that includes formats, hosting and most importantly licensing agreements by encouraging widespread adoption of the Creative Commons v3 NZ license.
For Government agencies to really start opening up their data, this needs to be driven from within Government, and only the SSC has the voice to be able to catalyse this process. Sure, individuals such as myself are engaging with success, and in some cases we’ll be able to obtain access - such as my recent win with Transit’s 2008 road survey trackpoint data. But for an individual to engage multiple agencies is very time consuming, and it is a slow process - especially when we are often cold calling and have to restate our case for publicly accessible data every time. And honestly, it is not something we as volunteers should have to be doing, this is really work that paid government personnel should be doing.
SSC needs to short-circuit this process by stepping up and creating an inter-agency mechanism to accept requests from citizens, and use the position of the SSC to engage, promote and ensure release of the data - whether spatial or not.
Thanks for the response Gavin.
InDevelopment provides a place where people can identify opportunities for an agency to make data more freely available – as you have done.
My intention is that the Government CIO team will take these suggestions and use them in discussion with an agency or groups of agencies.
There are a range of component parts that need to be put in place – standards, formats and licensing arrangements. I see InDevelopment as a valuable forum where we can collectively discuss issues that arise as we open up government data.
There are a number of recent international initiatives that the Government CIO team is watching with great interest and considering for application in New Zealand.
The Seoul Declaration for the Future of the Internet Economy, agreed by OECD member countries in Seoul in June this year, recognises the importance of public sector information in the global economy. It notes that “Public organisations are a major source of information, an increasing amount of which is digitised or produced in digital form and can be re-used in innovative ways for significant economic and social benefit.” It strongly advocates opening up, maximising access to and allowing non-exclusive re-use of non-personal public sector information and digital content, irrespective of the country’s funding model for developing and maintaining the information. It also encourages licensing approaches which clarify copyright ownership and usage, and promotes transparent and consistent pricing which encourages competition. NZ as an OECD member state has adopted the Enhanced Access and More Effective Re-use Recommendation. See http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/0/27/40826024.pdf
The UK Office of Public Sector Information has a Public Sector Information Unlocking Service beta site. People can list the Public Sector Information Holder, The information asset they want unlocked, The problem, Their ideal solution, and What they would do.
So far, 17 people have listed data they would like unlocked. Take a look at (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/unlocking-service/OPSIpage.aspx?page=UnlockIndex)
The UK Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, seeking ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. There is £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. See http://showusabetterway.com/
And finally, the Queensland state government has developed the Government Licensing Framework (GILF) based on open access principles. It is currently testing the applicability of the framework in its Office of Economic and Statistical Research. See http://www.qsic.qld.gov.au/qsic/QSIC.nsf/CPByUNID/6C31063F945CD93B4A257096000CBA1A
So there is much to discuss on opening up New Zealand government data and information.
Just a quick note for those that have read this and thought, “…opening up all our information will take ages!!”. Yes, it will if we carry on down the “let’s get it 100% perfect and 100% cover all”. Can we just stop thinking about the perfect world and just start opening up information using standards (where they exist) now!
For instance, there is a widely recognised standard for calendaring, iCal. Let’s just start using it … now … not tomorrow when it’s ALL, 100% ready …
What about contact information, hCard!
There ya go - two formats that open up all event based data and all contact information - let’s do it!
In fact there’s probably micro formats for a lot (not all, but a lot) of data that we can all just start using RIGHT NOW!
Web 2,0 is NOT just about technology, it’s an attitude of “stop taking, start doing”. Chip away, iteratively release and just do it.
For those that would like to see my own blog thoughts on the above (thanks Matthew): http://work.miramarmike.co.nz/2008/08/nz-government-20-where-is-it.html
Gavin
In my role as Legal Advisor to Government Technology Services and the GCIO, I read your comments regarding Crown copyright and Creative Commons with much interest, and thought you might like to hear about recent and future inititiaves within SSC on the general issue of Crown ownership and licensing of its intellectual property and data sets. This is a fascinating area and one in which I expect we’ll see significant change in the near- to mid-term future. To my own mind, technological developments in the forms of RSS/Atom, APIs and microformats (to name a few), movements such as Creative Commons, and the economic benefits of liberalisation make this something of an inevitability, at least in some quarters.
In recent times, different areas of SSC’s ICT Branch have been dealing with or exploring:
(1) the release of portal source code on GPL terms;
(2) the release of national broadband map application source code on BSD terms and certain broadband demand data through APIs and pursuant to a relaxed copyright licence which expressly contemplates re-use and mashups;
(3) Guidelines on the Treatment of Intellectual Property Rights in ICT Contracts, which encourage supplier- rather than Crown-ownership of newly developed IP in ICT contracts, unless there are good reasons for the Crown owning such newly developed IP;
(4) the release of SSC’s own Staff Contribution Guidelines for this blog on Creative Commons terms (using the most permissive form of the Creatve Commons New Zealand law licence);
(5) the release of a suite of authentication standards on Creative Commons terms;
(6) liberalisation of the Crown copyright provisions in the Web Standards;
(7) updating the government’s feed standard;
(8) exploration of microformats; and
(9) consideration of the current Policy Framework on Government-Held Information, including a possible all-of-government approach to Creative Commons licences where appropriate.
To my mind, all such activities point in the singular direction of freeing up the Crown’s intellectual property and data, for the benefit of both those whose taxpayer funds contribute to its creation and the economy more generally.
At the same time, you are right to point out that there is not, as yet, a comprehensive all-of-government approach to such issues in all areas. To some extent that is probably not surprising as we are dealing with new or newish technologies, there is a need for education (particularly within government circles) on the benefits of liberalisation and the appropriate forms of licences in different circumstances (e.g., Creative Commons licences are generally considered inappropriate for software/source code releases), and all-of-government approaches usually follow consultation with both stakeholders across government and interested parties such as yourself.
As regards your comment about Crown copyright not being the ideal basis on which to enable the republishing of data, with something like Creative Commons release being preferable, I don’t actually see inconsistency between Crown copyright and Creative Commons licensing. As you probably know, Crown copyright is a particular species of copyright. As a species of copyright, it can usefully be conceptualised as a bundle of rights which, like any copyright owner, the Crown can deal with as it pleases. In legal terms I believe it is perfectly open to the Crown to licence information and data sets on Creative Commons terms. In any given case the relevant department would want to consider the various Creative Commons licences and choose the most appropriate form (or it might be that alternative licences need to be considered, depending on circumstance). The department would want to consider the non-revocability of such licences and whether to supplement the standard terms with any additional terms but, in general terms, I see Crown copyright and certain types of Creative Commons licences being able to live in perfect harmony. And the beauty of Creative Commons, of course, is that - once a policy decision has been made that X or Y form of licence is appropriate for government use (as yet, there is no such general policy decision), then the licences are easy to apply without too much agitation by the likes of me (i.e., lawyers).
For my part, I look forward to being involved in discussions around liberalised licensing of the Crown’s intellectual property and would encourage feedback from people like you who are dealing with such issues at the coalface. I would echo Laurence’s statement that In Development can be a valuable forum for collectively discussing issues that arise as government data is opened up. If you see examples of Crown copyright/licensing statements on any SSC sites that you think are too restrictive, feel free to let me know (richard.best@ssc.govt.nz) as we can always consider amending them if appropriate. I value such input because it usefully informs the drafting of such statements. While we lawyers advising Government Technology Services endeavour to stay on top of relevant technologies and developments, we inevitably stand to benefit from a better understanding of particular technical and licensing issues facing developers wishing to re-use and bring added value to government data.
One final remark I’d make concerns your wish to see a mechanism whereby individuals (and, I’d add, organisations) can approach SSC with a request regarding the availability of data, in useable forms, from given agencies. While I can’t prophesise on that from an SSC perspective, I do note that just such an initiative was announced recently in the UK, as to which, you might be interested in Nick Holmes’ blog post “Unlocking the power of information” (http://www.binarylaw.co.uk/index.php/2008/07/10/unlocking-the-power-of-information/).
Thanks for your comments on the blog.
Richard Best
Hi Richard,
Thanks for the reply.
Firstly, you give great examples of what SSC is doing, and doing well! It is a pity however that many government agencies however are not able to keep up with the leading edge, and indeed, are only able to incorporate some new functionality into their websites when they see a major refresh every 3-5 years. I think in this regard, the SSC needs to be a bit more proactive in getting government agencies to modernise their web presence.
I’m interested in point 3 - the Guidelines on the Treatment of Intellectual Property Rights in ICT Contracts. At a quick skim, it would appear that the interest is solely on the commercialisation of intellectual property rights, and suggests little in terms of incorporating open source software as a potential solution (noting that option 1 would appear to allow the Customer Agency to own IP and release it under open source licensing if it so chooses).
An example that is close to my heart is Sahana, an open source web-based disaster management system that start in Sri Lanka following the tsunami. I am now on the Board and I am interested in finding Government funding for development of Sahana - given that Government agencies are likely to be the main users. I’m a firm believer that if a system can be developed for emergency management, and it can be funded by government, then we can actually provide this as a public good back to not only other users in New Zealand such as local government, but also contribute to a worldwide body of work. If I was to be cheeky, I’d suggest that this non-commercial IP option should also be presented as an option in the guidelines. Not everything needs to be commercialised - sometimes tax payer funds should support public good projects such as Sahana that is trying to provide powerful tools to manage disasters. And yes, wealthier countries with experience such as New Zealand should contribute this knowledge so that other countries, such as our neighbours in the South Pacific are able to benefit from our funding and knowledge. They can’t afford commercial solutions for disaster management. I digress
Re: Crown Copyright, Creative Commons et al - perhaps inconsistency between individuals licenses was not what I was referring to. Crown Copyright is quite a close neighbour to Creative Commons in terms of freedom. The point I was trying to make is that LINZ Crown Copyright licensing is different from Statistics New Zealand Crown Copyright is different from Ministry of Health Crown Copyright is different from New Zealand Fire Service Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright’s seem to differ in subtle and minor ways as defined by the agency that owns the information. This make it difficult to say take and republish this information, say by creating a data-warehouse, because Government isn’t doing this. the difficulty comes because as you said, there is a different bundle of rights with each piece of data that Government releases, subtle differences, but time consuming to work with, particularly in aggregation.
And yes, even Creative Commons is not perfect. There is a gap I have identified with geospatial data. With authoritative Crown data, there are some datasets that you don’t want people editing, so you could license it with CC No Derivatives. However, this goes a step to far, as this now disallows the conversion of the data into different formats, such as that required to convert shapefiles into use for handheld GPS receivers. The gap here is that No Derivatives needs to be clarified further, as some derivatives should be allowed (format-shifting) whilst other types of derivatives should not be allowed (editing/manipulation of underlying data) for certain authoritative Crown datasets. For example, one may be election boundaries - something where the underlying data should not be allowed, but format-shifting should certainly be allowed so that you can convert it to the application of your choice. But I don’t believe that the current No Derivatives license allows format shifting.
Having tens or hundreds of subtly different variants of Crown Copyright can create barriers to uptake of that Crown resource. This is less of an issue with end products such as reports and guidelines, but can be a major stumbling block for geospatial or statistics data.
As an example, I will email you the license attached to the New Zealand Fire Service ‘NZ Localities’ geospatial data that I recently licensed for our business from NZFS (for free). Whilst the terms and conditions outlined in the license are understandable, they do present barriers to more widespread use and adoption of the data. And naturally, as it is a custom license, it requires reading and understanding. I’m relatively comfortable reading licenses now, but not everyone is, and that is something that Creative Commons do well - they provide human-readable ‘translations’ of licenses.
I guess where I’m heading to here is that SSC may want to consider producing guidelines as to license options for the type of product they are releasing. We should not be encouraging agencies to write custom licenses and proliferating licenses with minor differences. From a public perspective, we need a limited number of clearly understood licenses with clearly communicated rights.
I am aware that LINZ and Statistics were happy licensing their topographical data under Creative Commons which made it easy to post their datasets to Koordinates. It is non-trivial to do this with custom licenses.
It is also good to see the work being done in the UK, however, as I noted when I looked at some of the data made available for the mashup competition, most of the data requires the uses of web API’s and detailed click-through licensing. Once again, these create further barriers to entry in the use of publicly-funded data.
Cheers Gavin
Hi Gavin
Many thanks for raising these points. I’ll try to address each of them briefly in turn.
Modernisation of agencies’ web presence: hopefully the revised Web Standards will go some way towards achieving this, together with other guidelines or a revised Policy Framework for Government Held Information (in the works). I appreciate, however, that there is a divergence in licensing regimes across government and in the functionality and data formats offered. Without wishing to sound like a Pantene ad, I think change will happen, but probably not overnight (I’m probably aging myself a bit in making that remark).
IP Guidelines: Crown retention of new IP under an ICT contract is certainly still possible when retention is desirable in the interests of making that IP available to the public under an open source licence. As you note, the Guidelines expressly contemplate that. It’s also a point that was made when the Guidelines were released. The SSC press release quotes these words from Laurence Millar, GCIO: “Government agencies will also retain the right, where appropriate, to allow free use of the intellectual property on open source terms” (http://www.e.govt.nz/resources/news/2008/20080131.html). The Guidelines don’t explicitly refer to public good projects; perhaps they should. That’s something we can consider when the Guidelines are next updated. I’ve referred your comment to the person in charge of the Guidelines. One might also note that the Guidelines do not apply to “content that could be covered by the Policy Framework for Government Held Information”.
Differential licensing: I take your point about inconsistency between different copyright licences across government. It is something I have noticed when reviewing different governmental websites’ copyright statements. There is also sometimes a lack of clarity as to whether RSS feeds may be reused or not. While the copyright-related standards in the Web Standards are currently under review, as is the Policy Framework referred to above, I’m not sure we’ll ever achieve absolute consistency, as there may be reasons for some information and data sets being more liberally licensed than others. I do agree, however, that there is scope for better alignment and for a number of generally accepted licences for government use (whether Creative Commons, Creative Commons-modified or otherwise) so as to significantly reduce the differences and make life easier for those who wish to reuse and add value to government information.
Crown copyright and Creative Commons: Crown copyright is only close to Creative Commons to the extent that agencies, either pursuant to Government guidelines or mandates (such as the Web Standards) or on their own initiative, choose to grant a licence to material/information on terms approximating Creative Commons licences. In other words, it is the licensing of Crown copyright material on terms approximating Creative Commons terms that renders them close neighbours. Without such licensing, they are different beasts. Without licensing, reuse/copying etc of Crown copyright material would constitute a breach of copyright. Another way of looking at this is to say that it’s the approach to reuse taken in the Policy Framework and in the Web Standards that gets close to Creative Commons, not Crown copyright itself.
Gaps in Creative Commons licences: I agree that a given Creative Commons licence may not always be perfect/suitable. Without binding the Commission in any way (which I’m not entitled to do) I suggest we will need to consider the “No derivatives” point you make as part of the Policy Framework review.
Thanks again for your thoughts on this topic. Very helpful.
Richard