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Avatar of Laura James

by Laura James

Shakespeare review: analysis

May 15, 2013 in Access to Information, News, Open Data, Open Government Data

We welcome the Shakespeare review as a time to reflect, coming as it does at a time of great growth in open data in government and the public sector.

The UK has lead the way with government taking a pioneering stance on open data policy in recent years, and this report sets out key recommendations for how to best take forward this work.

It is particularly good to see acknowledgement that there is a “difference between a commitment to transparency and a true National Data Strategy for economic growth” as it is clear that many of the benefits of open public sector information will go beyond the economic.

As the Open Knowledge Foundation has long emphasized:

The best thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else

Shakespeare recognises this with the comment that “we cannot always predict where the greatest value lies but know there are huge opportunities across the whole spectrum of PSI.”

Getting more data released quickly, without agonising over quality concerns, is an excellent recommendation and we look forward to seeing this in practice. Alongside this we welcome the demand for high quality information in the National Core Reference Data plan, including key entity data; such reference data, following clear open standards, will transform what can be done with UK data. The request that Trading Funds should remove restrictive PSI licensing and work towards releasing all raw data for use and reuse is particularly warmly welcomed.

We are pleased to see consideration being given to privacy and confidentiality issues; our definition of open data has always excluded personally-identifiable information, but with greater data collection than ever before, we acknowledge the challenges this can bring for data publishers. The demand for realistic and pragmatic consideration of privacy and confidentiality is welcomed, and best practice guidelines will be very helpful in assisting data publishers here. In addition we hope to see key security and privacy sector experts engaged in this as there are tough technical challenges around anonymisation, aggregation and sandbox use, and deep technical understanding is needed to fully appreciate the risks and limits of such systems, and to create sensible guidelines.

We are also delighted to see open access mentioned in the report; open access to publicly-funded research data and papers has been a long-standing tenet of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s work. Shakespeare notes that “even today, access to academic research that has been paid for by the public is deliberately denied to the public, and to many researchers, by commercial publishers, aided by university lethargy, and government reluctance to apply penalties; thereby obstructing scientific progress.” We can, and must, do better here.

We applaud the call for more data scientists and greater statistical skills at all levels; stronger data awareness and skills are critical for all the benefits of open data to be realised. In particular, the recognition that interactive and workshop methods can be most effective at teaching data skills is well aligned with our own School of Data and long standing culture of hackathons and developer engagement. The more teaching and training around data, alongside other key STEM areas including maths and technology, the better.

Finally, it is great to see that the economic value of open data will be assessed through research and audit, but at the same time it is vital to be realistic about the timescales for significant change and impact in this field. We think on a timescale of decades to see the full benefits and effects of the new open approaches to creation, sharing and reuse of knowledge, and government and others must be realistic about what will be achieved and how quickly, to avoid disappointment.

Open data is valuable to us socially and culturally as well as commercially, but it is only one part of a solution, and we need to work on the other key elements, including institutional change, tools, skills and awareness, which are also necessary conditions to realise the full benefits of openness. These other elements may be harder, and more expensive, than the release of data – we should still release more open data, and we are glad to see this report affirming this and encouraging data skills alongside – but the journey is far from over.

As Shakespeare puts it:

“It is now time to build on the very positive start we have made on open data with a more directed, more predictable engineering of usable information. Obstacles must be cleared, structures defined, and progress audited, so that we have a purposeful, progressive strategy that we can trust to deliver the full benefits to the nation.”

If you’re interested in open data and you’d like to join our global community of open government data advocates, you can join our open-government mailing list:

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

We need open carbon emissions data now!

May 13, 2013 in Access to Information, Campaigning, Featured, Featured Project, Open Data, Policy, WG Sustainability, Working Groups

Last week the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, a level which is said to be unprecedented in human history.

Leading scientists and policy makers say that we should be aiming for no more than 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic runaway climate change.

But what’s in a number? Why is the increase from 399 to 400 significant?

While the actual change is mainly symbolic (and some commentators have questioned whether we’re hovering above or just below 400), the real story is that we are badly failing to cut emissions fast enough.

Given the importance of this number, which represents humanity’s progress towards tackling one of the biggest challenges we currently face – the fact that it has been making the news around the world is very welcome indeed.

Why don’t we hear about the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from politicians or the press more often? While there are regularly headlines about inflation, interest and unemployment, numbers about carbon emissions rarely receive the level of attention that they deserve.

We want this to change. And we think that having more timely and more detailed information about carbon emissions is essential if we are to keep up pressure on the world’s governments and companies to make the cuts that the world needs.

As our Advisory Board member Hans Rosling puts it, carbon emissions should be on the world’s dashboard.

Over the coming months we are going to be planning and undertaking activities to advocate for the release of more timely and granular carbon emissions data. We are also going to be working with our global network to catalyse projects which use it to communicate the state of the world’s carbon emissions to the public.

If you’d like to join us, you can follow #OpenCO2 on Twitter or sign up to our open-sustainability mailing list:

Image credit: Match smoke by AMagill on Flickr. Released under Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Avatar of Ton Zijlstra

by Ton Zijlstra

The new PSI Directive – as good as it seems?

April 19, 2013 in Access to Information, External, Open Data

A closer look at the new PSI Directive by Ton Zijlstra and Katleen Janssen EPP

image by European People’s Party CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On 10 April, the European Commission’s Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, announced that the European Union (EU) Member States have approved a text for the new PSI Directive. The PSI Directive governs the re-use of public sector information, otherwise known as as Open Government Data.

In this posting we take a closer look at the progress the EC press release claims, and make a comparison with the current PSI Directive. We base this comparison on the text (not officially published) of the output of the final trialogue of 25 March and apparently accepted by the Member States last week.

The final step now, after this acceptance by Member States, is the adoption of the same text by the European Parliament, who have been part of the trialogue and thus are likely to be in agreement. The vote in the ITRE Committee is planned on 25 April, and the plenary Parliament vote on 11 June. Member States will then have 24 months to transpose the new directive into national law, which means it should be in force towards the end of 2015 across the EU.

The Open Data yardstick

The existing PSI Directive was adopted in 2003, well before the emergence of the Open Data movement, and written with mostly ‘traditional’ and existing re-users of government information in mind. Within the wider Open Data community this new PSI Directive will largely be judged by a) how well it moves towards embracing Open Data as the norm, in the sense of the Open Definition, and b) to what extent it makes this mandatory for EU Member States.

This means that scope and access rights, and redress options where those rights are denied, charging and licensing practices as well as standards and formats are of interest here. We will go through these points of interest point by point:

Access rights and scope

  • The new PSI Directive brings museums, libraries and archives within its scope; however a range of exceptions and less strict rules apply to these data holders;
  • The Directive builds, as before, on existing national legislation concerning freedom of information and privacy and data protection. This means it only looks at re-use in the context of what is already legally public, and it does not make pro-active publishing mandatory in any way;
  • The general principle for re-use has been revised. Where the old directive describes cases where re-use has been allowed (making it dependent on that approval and thus leaving the choice to the Member States or the public bodies), the new directive says all documents within scope (i.e. legally public) shall be re-usable for commercial or non-commercial purposes. This is the source of the statement by Commissioner Neelie Kroes that a “genuine right to re-use public information, not present in the original 2003 Directive” has been created. For documents of museums, libraries, and archives the old rule applies: re-use needs to be allowed first (except for cultural resources that are opened up after exclusive agreements for their digitisation have ended – see below).

Asking for documents to re-use, and redress mechanisms if denied

  • The way in which citizens can ask to be provided with documents for re-use, or the way government bodies can respond, has not changed;
  • The redress mechanisms available to citizens have been specified in slightly more detail. It specifies that one of the ways of redress should be through an “impartial review body with appropriate expertise”, “swift” and with binding authority, “such as the national competition authority, the national access to documents authority or the national judicial authority”. This, although more specific than before, is not the creation of a specific, speedy and independent redress procedure hoped for.

Charging practices

  • When charges apply, they shall be limited to the “marginal costs of reproduction, provision and dissemination”, which is left open to interpretation. Marginal costing is an important principle, as in the case of digital material it would normally mean no charges apply;
  • The PSI Directive leaves room for exceptions to the stated norm of marginal costing, for public sector bodies who are required to generate revenue and for specifically excepted documents: firstly, they rely once more on the concept of the public task, which in the previous version of the directive has raised so much discussion; secondly, a distinction is made between institutions that have to generate revenue to cover a substantial part of all their costs and those that may generally be fully-funded by the State (except for particular datasets of which the collection, production, reproduction and dissemination has to be covered for a substantial part by revenue). Could this be a way to cover economic or even commercial activities, by defining them as a ‘public task’, thereby avoiding the non-discrimination rules requiring equal treatment of possible competitors?
  • The exceptions remain bound to an upper limit, that of the old PSI directive for the exceptions relating to institutions having to generate revenue. For cultural institutions, the upper limit of the total income includes the costs of collection, production, preservation and rights clearance, reproduction and dissemination, together with a reasonable return on investment;
  • How costs are structured and determined, and used to motivate standard charges, needs to be pre-established and published. In the case of the mentioned exceptions, charges and criteria applied need to be pre-established and published, with the calculation used being made transparent on request (as was the general rule before);
  • This requirement for standard charges to be fully transparent up-front, meaning before any request for re-use is submitted, might prove to have an interesting impact: it is unlikely that public sector bodies will go through establishing marginal costs and the underlying calculations for every data set they hold, but charges can no longer be applied as they have not been pre-established, motivated and published.

Licensing

  • The new PSI Directive contains no changes concerning licensing, so no explicit move towards open licenses;
  • Where Member States attach conditions to re-use, a standard license should be available, and public sector bodies should be encouraged to use it;
  • Conditions to re-use should not unnecessarily restrict re-use, nor restrict competition;
  • The Commission is asked to assist the Member States by creating guidelines, particularly relating to licensing.

Non-discrimination and Exclusive agreements

  • The existing rules to ensuring non-discrimination in how conditions for re-use are applied, including for commercial activities by the public sector itself, are continued;
  • Exclusive arrangements are not allowed as before, except for ensuring public interest services, or for digitisation projects by museums, libraries and archives. For the former, reviews are mandated every 3 years; for the latter, reviews are mandated after 10 years and then every 7 years. However, it is only the duration that should be reviewed, not their existence itself. In return for the exclusivity, the public body has to get a free copy of the cultural resources which must be available for re-use when the exclusive agreement ends. Here, the cultural institutions no longer have a choice whether to allow re-use, but it may be several years before the resource actually becomes available.

Formats and standards

  • Open standards and machine readable formats should be used for both documents and their metadata, where easily possible, but otherwise any pre-existing format and language is acceptable.

In summary, the new PSI Directive does not seem to take the bold steps the open data movement has been clamoring for over the past five years. At the same time, real progress has been made. Member States with a constructive approach will feel encouraged to do more. Also, the effort of transparency in charging may dissuade public sector bodies from applying charges. But the new PSI Directive will not serve as a tool for citizens aiming for more openness by default and by design. Even with the new redress mechanisms, getting your rights acknowledged and acted upon will remain a long and arduous path as before.

It will be interesting to see the European Parliament, as representative body, debate this in plenary.

About the authors

Katleen Jansen is a postdoctoral researcher in information law at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT of KU Leuven, coordinator of the LAPSI 2.0 thematic network (www.lapsi-project.eu) and board member of OKFN Belgium. She specialises in re-use of PSI, open data, access to information and spatial data infrastructures. Currently working on open data licensing for the Flemish Region.

Ton Zijlstra has been involved in open government data since 2008. He is working for local, national and international public sector bodies to help them ‘do open data well’, both as an activist and consultant. Ton wrote the first plans for the Dutch national data portal, did a stint as project lead for the European Commission at http://epsiplatform.eu, and is now partner at The Green Land, a Netherlands based open data consultancy. He is a regular keynote speaker on open data, open government, and disruptive change / complexity across Europe.

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Avatar of Stefan Wehrmeyer

by Stefan Wehrmeyer

Announcing v3.0 of Froide – the Open-Source Python-Based Freedom of Information Platform

March 15, 2013 in Access to Information, OKF Germany, Open Government Data

I’m happy to announce version 3 release of Froide, the Open Source, Python-based platform for running Freedom of Information portals. Froide has been in development for nearly two years. It has powered the FOI portal in Germany for over a year and a half and has recently been used to launch an Austrian FoI site.

Full instructions for getting started with Froide can be found here, and the source code is online on github here.This latest release comes with the latest version of the Python web framework Django 1.5 and Bootstrap 2.3. All other dependencies have also been upgraded.

Some of the major features include:

FragDenStaat.de – Ask the State

Froide got started back in spring of 2011 when OKF Germany decided to create an FOI site. Unfortunately at that time the code of WhatDoTheyKnow was not ready to be used elsewhere (Alaveteli didn’t exist at all – plus, it must be said I’m a pythonista and it was ruby app!). I therefore started building an FOI platform based on Python/Django for Germany, internationalized from the ground up. After four months of coding and preparations we launched FragDenStaat.de – the German FOI portal – in August 2011.

Since then the software has seen continuous improvements and new features. Several of these additional features have been motivated by specific requirements for Germany, like tracking the cost of a request, uploading postal replies from authorities, hiding requester names from the public and redacting PDFs online. Froide leverages the power of the Django admin that allows community moderators to help with administration tasks and guide requesters on their FOI journey.

Just recently FragDenStaat.de got a little brother: the Austrian FOI portal FragDenStaat.at got off the ground and will track the development of the upcoming FOI legislation in Austria.

Challenges Overcome

Over the last two years, the German FOI community have struggled with – and overcome – many FOI oddities: baseless cost threats, lot of anti-digital behaviour, and very creative excuses for why information cannot be released. FragDenStaat.de has send out more than 3000 requests and the Federal FOI statistic for 2012 is at an all time high with more than a third of requests delivered and tracked by FragDenStaat.de.

One of the most interesting stories was a ban on publishing documents received through FOI: the German parliament had sent over a report on MP corruption but denied the right to publish it on the grounds of copyright. Any citizen could get and read the report by requesting it, but nobody was allowed to share it freely! This Kafkaesque situation made it difficult to spread the word and limited public debate on the topic. But we quickly came up with a solution to this problem: one-click requests for that specific document in your name. We quickly got hundreds of people to make this request and sparked a debate about the topic. Even though the documents have been leaked on the net, the German parliament still refuses to publish them. The matter will soon be resolved in front of a judge, but until then we continue to provide an easy means to request the documents and take a stand for FOI.

Colophon

Froide and FragDenStaat.de are civic coding projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. Check out their other projects.

This article would also be incomplete without a shout out here to Alaveteli – the excellent Open Source Ruby on Rails FOI software built by the great folks at MySociety – and to WhatDoTheyKnow, the original FOI site built by MySociety for the UK, which inspired both FragDenStaat and many other sites around the world.

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Avatar of Mark Brough

by Mark Brough

Launching the Aid Transparency Tracker

March 13, 2013 in Access to Information

Publish What You Fund has undertaken some initial analysis of aid donors’ plans to publish to the IATI component of the agreed common standard for aid information. Here, Mark Brough explains the process they went through to take a series of Excel files, convert them into a format suitable for analysis, and come to some overall conclusions.

The short version: check out the Aid Transparency Tracker.

Why we did this

At the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, in November 2011, the world’s aid donors agreed a “common, open standard” for publishing aid information. Donors also agreed in Busan to publish “implementation schedules” explaining in detail how and when they would meet this commitment.

The implementation schedules are like a forward-looking calendar, explaining when donors plan to publish specific pieces of data, like results, project documents, and conditions, as well as transaction-level spending data. They also explain whether the donor will be publishing under an open license (public domain or attribution-only) and whether they will be republishing every quarter as a minimum frequency of publication – both are required for IATI compliance. These implementation schedules were published on the OECD/DAC’s common standard website, but in several different formats, which required a detailed look at each donor’s schedule, as well as interpreting them when donors have completed them in different ways or understood the various options differently.

Pulling all the schedules into a single application allows us to assess donors’ overall ambition; compare fields across schedules; show the publication of fields over time from different donors; and provide CSV, JSON/JSONP) and iCal feeds for each donor.

The original implementation schedules

The implementation schedules were published in individual Excel files, containing three main sheets: general, agency, and activity-level information.

  • General
    Approach to publication: includes timeliness and frequency, licence, initial publication dates, scope of publication.
  • Agency
    Agency-level publication: includes country budgets, organisation documents.
  • Activity
    Activity-level publication: includes information about when the organisation will (or won’t) be compliant with each field in the standard.

Templates

While there is a template for the common standard implementation schedules, several different templates exist, and donors further added to this complexity by modifying the templates, changing options, and adding and deleting rows – in all, we counted eleven different versions. Importing the schedules proved difficult because of this. In addition, some donors published their Excel-based templates in PDF format, which made it impossible to automatically parse them. In these cases, it was necessary to copy and paste the same data into new spreadsheets. While the data was thoroughly checked, it is possible that some human error will have resulted. Some interpretation was necessary to ensure consistency and comparability across the schedules.

Importing

The schedules were automatically parsed and imported into this application. Publish What You Fund staff then checked the resulting data to ensure that it had been parsed correctly and that it made sense.

  • Select a file
    The user can select a schedule from any publicly-accessible URL. This could be the OECD/DAC common standard website, the IATI website, or the donor’s own website. Where the original schedules could not be automatically parsed (e.g. because they were in PDF), a new spreadsheet was created by Publish What You Fund using the information included in the original schedule.
  • Check fields
    The schedule was successfully parsed and is presented to the user to check and correct, make sure that all information has been parsed correctly, ensure that compliance status is consistent with notes, and score for partially compliant fields if the publisher has understated their publication relative to other donors.

Openness begets openness

None of this would have been possible without :

  1. A range of great open-source tools:
  2. Implementation schedules released by donors as part of the common standard, transparently outlining in detail their specific commitments to publish more and better data.

But, we’ve also fed back: iati-implementationxml has been expanded to add compatibility with the common standard formats of implementation schedules; to detect the format of different schedules; and to function as a module that can be imported. We provided a couple of pull request for some small bugs with ReclineJS, and of course, we’re releasing all of our own code as well (although, it could definitely do with some tidying up…).

What’s next?

Now that we’ve looked at what information different donors are committing to publish, there are two main steps for us:

  1. Doing it again: we want to check the assumptions and interpretations we’ve made with donors to ensure that they’re accurate, as well as encouraging all donors to be more ambitious about the information they’re planning to publish. As part of this, we’ll also aim to iron out the problems in the schedule.
  2. Looking at publication: now that we have better data on what donors are committing to do, the question arises: what are they actually publishing, and are they meeting their commitments? We’ll be working on that throughout the year and will release this analysis in October. Until then, all of our code is of course being developed as an open-source project on Github.

We’d love your feedback, so please get in touch:

Links

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Avatar of Theodora Middleton

by Theodora Middleton

Open Food Facts

March 4, 2013 in Access to Information, OKF France, Open Data

One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.

Food is becoming an increasingly political issue. Food security has risen up the international agenda to become one of the most talked-about aspects of strategic planning for the future. From questions of who owns the patents on the seeds people need to survive, to questions of the effects of additives in your body, to understanding the impact of our consumption habits on the environment, information about food is much-needed and often difficult to come by.

The G8 is organising an International Conference on Open Data in Agriculture, to take place on the 28th and 29th April. The idea is to openly share useful, publicly funded information about agriculture across international borders, so the everyone can move towards greater food security. In particular, the G8 group have made a commitment to share this data with African countries to enable “a sustainable increase in food security”.

There’s an open call for ideas to present at the conference, so if you have thoughts about how open data can improve global food security and food use then think about getting in touch. The folk from Open Food Facts are submitting their ideas, and they’ve invited input into their letter explaining why the project is important. The deadline for submissions has been extended to the 8th March, so now’s the moment!

If you’d like to get involved in discussions about open data, food and sustainability more generally, sign up for our Open Sustainability Working Group.

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Avatar of Ross Mounce

by Ross Mounce

Content Mining in Europe: Further Licensing is Not The Only Way

February 28, 2013 in Access to Information, Legal, Open Science

A significant number of groups who support knowledge policies for the public good, including ourselves, have signed and published a letter of concern arising from one of the working groups of the Licences for Europe – A Stakeholder Dialogue meetings in Brussels.

This particular working group was Working Group 4, which was set to discuss ways and means of enabling Text and Data Mining (TDM) for research. I was present as both a user of mining techniques in my academic research and official representative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, as participant in the discussions.

The letter expresses concerns that in this TDM meeting we were presented “not with a stakeholder dialogue, but a process with an already predetermined outcome –namely that additional licensing is the only solution to the problems being faced by those wishing to undertake TDM”

We believe that this dialogue should fairly include discussion of copyright limitations and exceptions for such TDM activity. The Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes (pictured above) made a speech shortly before the working group meeting which indicated this would be an option to consider on the table of discussion:

But keep your minds open: maybe in some cases licensing won’t be the solution

It was also in the notes published in advance of the working group meeting that discussion would explore:

the potential and possible limits of standard licensing models

(emphasis mine)

Yet when we started discussions, all our attempts to discuss copyright exemptions for TDM, as successfully practised in the US, Japan, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea, were quickly shut-down by the dialogue moderators. It was made crystal clear to us that any further attempts to discuss this as a solution to the problems of TDM access would not be entertained. Many of us left the meeting feeling extremely frustrated that we were prevented from discussing what we thought was a reasonable and optimal solution practised elsewhere, and were only allowed to discuss sub-optimal cumbersome options involving re-licencing of content or collective licencing.

Thus the letter of concern finishes with 3 simple requests:

  1. All evidence, opinions and solutions to facilitate the widest adoption of TDM are given equal weighting, and no solution is ruled to be out of scope from the outset;
  2. All the proceedings and discussions are documented and are made publicly available;
  3. DG Research and Innovation becomes an equal partner in Working Group 4, alongside DGs Connect, Education and Culture, and MARKT – reflecting the importance of the needs of research and the strong overlap with Horizon 2020.

The greater than 50 participants & signatories of the letter include a Nobel Prize winner (Sir John Sulston), and top representatives of most European research funders, libraries and even smart tech companies with an interest in this area like Mendeley. We sincerely hope the European Commission takes action on this matter.

 

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Avatar of Andrew Palmer

by Andrew Palmer

An open goal that can’t be missed: 2015 and open data

February 28, 2013 in Access to Information, Open Data, WG Development

STOP PRESS: UN holds consultation.

Okay, so this may not be the most groundbreaking of introductions. It’s up there with such bombshells as “man catches bus” and “comedian tells joke” with but stick with me … it’s important.

Today marks the first day of the UN’s post-2015 consultation on governance, jointly hosted by South Africa and Germany. For the uninitiated, “post-2015” is the lingo that the UN has given to the process of deciding what comes after the Millennium Development Goals which expire at the end of 2015.

africa computer

As you may recall, in amongst the commotion of the millennium bug the turn of the century was accompanied by two significant actions by the UN. The first was the publication of ‘The Millennium Declaration’ which outlines the principles of cooperation for the twenty-first century and, incidentally, is probably one of the finest documents to emerge from UN headquarters on First Avenue at 46th Street, New York. The second was, at the time, the slightly less fanfared Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which set targets for developing countries in areas such as halving absolute poverty, providing greater access to education and reducing child mortality.

What we’ve learnt over the decade since the millenium is that what get measured counts. Wonderful prose and narrative on the importance of governance and human rights are to be applauded (and we should drive for more commitments), but when it comes to investing money governments have tended to focus on more measurable gains. The upshot of all this means that the MDGs, and the targets and indicators that they represent, have become the currency of twenty-first century development.

This brings me back to the UN post-2015 consultation on governance. If the lessons are to be learnt this time round it is essential that the values and principles of accountability, transparency and participation are translated into measurable goals, targets and indicators that are included as part of the goal framework – not as the side note. Without an explicit push to improve the quality, timeliness and availability of information any efforts to establish a transformational post-2015 agenda will only ever be directed at an incomplete, and potentially inaccurate, picture.

At Development Initiatives we have been working on proposals for a goal on access to information as well as proposals on open development with others. But alone we don’t have the all the answers or the influence to make this happen. What is needed is for other members of the open data community to be alert to the post-2015 process and how we can collectively use this forum to advance the cause for open and better quality data. In short, we need your help to make sure the UN understand that this is an open goal that can’t be missed.

If you’d like to find out more about the post-2015 process then please contact andrew.palmer@devinit.org

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

We Need an Open Database of Clinical Trials

February 5, 2013 in Access to Information, Campaigning, Featured, Open Data, Open Science, Open/Closed, Policy

The award winning science writer and physician Ben Goldacre recently launched a major campaign to open up the results of clinical trials.

The AllTrials initiative calls for all clinical trials to be reported and for the “full methods and the results” of each trial to be published.

Currently negative results are poorly recorded and positive results are overhyped, leading to what Goldacre calls ‘research fraud’, misleading doctors about the drugs they are prescribing and misleading patients about the drugs they are taking.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is an organisational supporter of AllTrials, and we encourage you to sign and share the petition if you have not already done so:

There have been some big wins in the past 48 hours. The lead legislator for a new EU Clinical Trials Regulation recently came out in favour of transparency for clinical trials. Today GlaxoSmithKline announced their support for the campaign, which, as Goldacre says, is “huge, and internationally huge”.

As well as continuing to push for stronger policies and practises that support the release of information about clinical trials, we would like to see a public repository of reports and results that doctors, patients and researchers can access and add to. We need an open database of clinical trials.

Over the past few days we’ve been corresponding with Ben and others on the AllTrials about how we might be able to work together to create such a database – building on the prototyping work that was presented at last year’s Strata event.

In the mean time, you can watch the TED talk if you haven’t seen it already – and help us to make some noise about the petition!


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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

First Open Economics International Workshop Recap

January 28, 2013 in Access to Information, Events, Featured, Open Access, Open Data, Open Economics, Open Standards, Our Work, WG Economics, Workshop

The first Open Economics International Workshop gathered 40 academic economists, data publishers and funders of economics research, researchers and practitioners to a two-day event at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop was to build an understanding around the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the obstacles to opening up information, as well as the role of greater openness of the academy. This event was organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law and was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Audio and slides are available at the event’s webpage.

Open Economics Workshop

Setting the Scene

The Setting the Scene session was about giving a bit of context to “Open Economics” in the knowledge society, seeing also examples from outside of the discipline and discussing reproducible research. Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation) emphasised that there is necessary change and substantial potential for economics: 1) open “core” economic data outside the academy, 2) open as default for data in the academy, 3) a real growth in citizen economics and outside participation. Daniel Goroff (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation) drew attention to the work of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in emphasising the importance of knowledge and its use for making decisions and data and knowledge as a non-rival, non-excludable public good. Tim Hubbard (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) spoke about the potential of large-scale data collection around individuals for improving healthcare and how centralised global repositories work in the field of bioinformatics. Victoria Stodden (Columbia University / RunMyCode) stressed the importance of reproducibility for economic research and as an essential part of scientific methodology and presented the RunMyCode project.

Open Data in Economics

The Open Data in Economics session was chaired by Christian Zimmermann (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis / RePEc) and was about several projects and ideas from various institutions. The session examined examples of open data in Economics and sought to discover whether these examples are sustainable and can be implemented in other contexts: whether the right incentives exist. Paul David (Stanford University / SIEPR) characterised the open science system as a system which is better than any other in the rapid accumulation of reliable knowledge, whereas the proprietary systems are very good in extracting the rent from the existing knowledge. A balance between these two systems should be established so that they can work within the same organisational system since separately they are distinctly suboptimal. Johannes Kiess (World Bank) underlined that having the data available is often not enough: “It is really important to teach people how to understand these datasets: data journalists, NGOs, citizens, coders, etc.”. The World Bank has implemented projects to incentivise the use of the data and is helping countries to open up their data. For economists, he mentioned, having a valuable dataset to publish on is an important asset, there are therefore not sufficient incentives for sharing.

Eustáquio J. Reis (Institute of Applied Economic Research – Ipea) related his experience on establishing the Ipea statistical database and other projects for historical data series and data digitalisation in Brazil. He shared that the culture of the economics community is not a culture of collaboration where people willingly share or support and encourage data curation. Sven Vlaeminck (ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics) spoke about the EDaWaX project which conducted a study of the data-availability of economics journals and will establish publication-related data archive for an economics journal in Germany.

Legal, Cultural and other Barriers to Information Sharing in Economics

The session presented different impediments to the disclosure of data in economics from the perspective of two lawyers and two economists. Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge / CIPIL) drew attention to the fact that there is a whole range of different legal mechanism which operate to restrict the dissemination of information, yet on the other hand there is also a range of mechanism which help to make information available. Lionel questioned whether the open data standard would be always the optimal way to produce high quality economic research or whether there is also a place for modulated/intermediate positions where data is available only on conditions, or only in certain part or for certain forms of use. Mireille van Eechoud (Institute for Information Law) described the EU Public Sector Information Directive – the most generic document related to open government data and progress made for opening up information published by the government. Mireille also pointed out that legal norms have only limited value if you don’t have the internalised, cultural attitudes and structures in place that really make more access to information work.

David Newbery (University of Cambridge) presented an example from the electricity markets and insisted that for a good supply of data, informed demand is needed, coming from regulators who are charged to monitor markets, detect abuse, uphold fair competition and defend consumers. John Rust (Georgetown University) said that the government is an important provider of data which is otherwise too costly to collect, yet a number of issues exist including confidentiality, excessive bureaucratic caution and the public finance crisis. There are a lot of opportunities for research also in the private sector where some part of the data can be made available (redacting confidential information) and the public non-profit sector also can have a tremendous role as force to organise markets for the better, set standards and focus of targeted domains.

Current Data Deposits and Releases – Mandating Open Data?

The session was chaired by Daniel Goroff (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation) and brought together funders and publishers to discuss their role in requiring data from economic research to be publicly available and the importance of dissemination for publishing.

Albert Bravo-Biosca (NESTA) emphasised that mandating open data begins much earlier in the process where funders can encourage the collection of particular data by the government which is the basis for research and can also act as an intermediary for the release of open data by the private sector. Open data is interesting but it is even more interesting when it is appropriately linked and combined with other data and the there is a value in examples and case studies for demonstrating benefits. There should be however caution as opening up some data might result in less data being collected.

Toby Green (OECD Publishing) made a point of the different between posting and publishing, where making content available does not always mean that it would be accessible, discoverable, usable and understandable. In his view, the challenge is to build up an audience by putting content where people would find it, which is very costly as proper dissemination is expensive. Nancy Lutz (National Science Foundation) explained the scope and workings of the NSF and the data management plans required from all economists who are applying for funding. Creating and maintaining data infrastructure and compliance with the data management policy might eventually mean that there would be less funding for other economic research.

Trends of Greater Participation and Growing Horizons in Economics

Chris Taggart (OpenCorporates) chaired the session which introduced different ways of participating and using data, different audiences and contributors. He stressed that data is being collected in new ways and by different communities, that access to data can be an enormous privilege and can generate data gravities with very unequal access and power to make use of and to generate more data and sometimes analysis is being done in new and unexpected ways and by unexpected contributors. Michael McDonald (George Mason University) related how the highly politicised process of drawing up district lines in the U.S. (also called Gerrymandering) could be done in a much more transparent way through an open-source re-districting process with meaningful participation allowing for an open conversation about public policy. Michael also underlined the importance of common data formats and told a cautionary tale about a group of academics misusing open data with a political agenda to encourage a storyline that a candidate would win a particular state.

Hans-Peter Brunner (Asian Development Bank) shared a vision about how open data and open analysis can aid in decision-making about investments in infrastructure, connectivity and policy. Simulated models about investments can demonstrate different scenarios according to investment priorities and crowd-sourced ideas. Hans-Peter asked for feedback and input on how to make data and code available. Perry Walker (new economics foundation) spoke about the conversation and that a good conversation has to be designed as it usually doesn’t happen by accident. Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation) concluded with examples about citizen economics and the growth of contributions from the wider public, particularly through volunteering computing and volunteer thinking as a way of getting engaged in research.

During two sessions, the workshop participants also worked on Statement on the Open Economics principles will be revised with further input from the community and will be made public on the second Open Economics workshop taking place on 11-12 June in Cambridge, MA.

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