In the Post-Bureaucratic Age, new online tools are enabling individuals to make use of government data to produce socially useful websites and applications, and enabling companies to use this data to develop new commercial products and services.
The Conservative Party has long been committed to opening up government data. Under a Conservative government, data would move from being secret by default to public by default; datasets will be published proactively and regularly, in a standardised format so that they can be ‘mashed up’ and interacted with. Future projects and programmes will need to anticipate a requirement that all or part of their datasets or databases may need to be available for public scrutiny.
A Conservative government will:
- publish online, in a standardised and open format, every item of spending over £25,000, enabling the public to see for the first time exactly how and where the government is spending their money.
- require local councils to publish online details of all expenditure over £1,000.
require all police forces to publish their local crime statistics online every month, in a standardised and open format.
- require all government contracts currently for tender with a value of over £10,000 to be published online via the existing Supply2Gov website. This will apply to central government departments, quangos and local government.
- publish online full information about all of DFID’s projects and programmes – including the results of impact evaluations. This information will be published in a standardised format so that it can be freely used on third-party websites.
However, we want to go further. We will introduce a new ‘right to government data’, so that members of the public can request – and receive – government datasets containing anonymised but socially or commercially useful information. This approach has been implemented by President Obama.
Some of these datasets may already be published – but in the incorrect format or on a non-regular basis. In these cases, we will simply be mandating the format, rather than publication per se.
Examples of the datasets that could be set free are:
- Planning permission documents
- Availability of council owned housing
- Transport timetables
- Police force performance data
- Road traffic data.
- Patterns of carbon emissions
However, there is currently no comprehensive list of government datasets. Consistent with our commitment to opening up the policy making process, we want to harness the wisdom of the crowd and find out which datasets should be published. Please use the comments section of this site to suggest the datasets you would like to be released, and we will use your suggestions to help us set government data free.
I read link to this in the Daily Telegraph.
A UK government should empower ground level public servants to oversee IT projects. These should conform to openly available standards.
I would favour a programme of IT innovation projects e.g. bid for up to £250,000 grants over 2-3 years to pay for locally based IT developers.
These developers would work on a daily basis with frontline staff to see in reality the problems that have IT solutions and see the IT problems that can be improved by seeing users in action.
I work as an NHS consultant, and would love to have an operational electronic health record. This would revolutionise my practice. If I was in a position to host, in my department, a couple of IT experts e.g. software developer, database programmer we could rapidly (1-2 years) develop a fully functioning electronic record system. If we used openElectronicHealthRecord (openEHR) standards the system would, as you say, be scaleable across the public service.
It galls me, if not angers me, to see the enormous waste of the last 10 years NHS It strategy – it is imperative that future users are central to the development process.