Speech by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Mr Brendan Howlin, T.D.

Seminar on Open Data

Conference Room 0.2, South Block

2.00pm, Wednesday 11 February 2015

Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. I am delighted to be here to provide some brief opening comments for this afternoon’s seminar. Open Data is a particular interest of mine; I see it as the new basic resource of the 21st century.

The concept of Open Data is about making data held by public bodies available and easily accessible online for re-use, or redistribution, at no or marginal cost.

Reform role

A key part of my role as Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, is to identify and drive reforms across the public service.

Frequently, the focus of attention can seem to be on the challenges of restoring our public finances – and we have worked as a Public Service to achieve massive progress in this regard. The challenge of building more open, transparent and accountable public governance in Ireland is my other key objective as Minister; and this is being achieved in terms of the range of reform initiatives currently being implemented across public bodies.

The Open Data Initiative is a key part of these reform activities. It fits with and is includedin the Public Service Reform Plan, the ICT Strategy, the Civil Service Renewal Plan and it is also a core element of Ireland’s Open Government Partnership (OGP) National Action Plan which was launched in July 2014.

Why is open data important?

So why is Open Data important? Data is being used to hold Government to account and rightly so. Open Data can be used to respond to questions such as:

  • How much is spent on the provision of policing services?
  • how effective are our hospitals? (how many are on trolleys, what are the real-time waiting lists for surgery etc)
  • how safe are our neighbourhoods?
  • how many students are coming on stream and are there enough school places?
  • when is the next bus?

The public has the right to know. Transparency and accountability are key to building trust in Government and Open Data will assist in achieving this objective.

The Public Service collects massive amounts of potentially valuable information including, for example, data dealing with public expenditure, demographics, transport, education, crime, health and land use.

Opening up non-personal Government data has the potential to strengthen our democracy; enable better decisions and better governance, inform choice over public services and, hugely importantly it will feed innovative enterprise - turning data into jobs.

In addition, the data standards that open data drives public bodies to adopt, can significantly enhance the value and utility of public service data that can potentially be shared between public bodies. It complements the data sharing and re-use of public sector information legislation underway, as well as recent reforms to Freedom of information.

I am delighted therefore to see your interest in Open Data and that you are fully engaging with it.

Progress with Open Data

Sometimes it can seem that we are talking about Open Data as if it is a brand new challenge for the Public Service, but we already have lots of examples of Open Data initiatives across public bodies.

The Central Statistics Office, the Marine Institute, the Ordinance Survey of Ireland, and other agencies have already done excellent work and Fingal Co Council is a notable champion in this area. Indeed, Tracey, Roband Dominic will be taking us through some examples today. Building on these efforts, implementation of the Government’s commitments on Open Data will help provide a central focus for the energy that currently exists in the Open Data area.

Good progress has been made since I launched our national portal last July, for example

  • following a tender process, my officials engaged a consortium (Insight@NUIG, Derilinx and Fujitsu) to support the Initiative and a substantial work programme is underway
  • A Public Bodies Working Group meets on a monthly basis to work on the technical framework to ensure publication of datasets on the portal (data.gov.ie) are in open, machine-readable formats, with robust and consistent metadata
  • There is ongoing development of the portal with further enhancements planned
  • My Department is finalising work on the specification for membership of an Open Data Governance Board which will be established to provide strategic leadership and vision for Open Data in Ireland; and
  • Outreach, dissemination and capacity building seminars such as this today to promote the commencement of data audits in public bodies.

Data Audits

While lots of Government data is already publicly available, it is not necessarily available as Open Data. For example, it may be locked into proprietary non-machine readable formats like PDFs, making it difficult to find, analyse and re-use. I would like to see more high value, high demand public data published in non-proprietary, machine readable formats, making public information available and more easily accessible online, with a view to it being used by businesses and citizens alike.

Further development of the portal is key in this regard. We currently have 509 datasets available on the portal – we need to build on this and add much more - we need your help to do so. We need to understand the kind of datasets we have in the Public Service and then identify which of these are suitable for publication as Open Data. Deirdre will tell you later about how to carry out audits of datasets in your organisations and I’m pleased that an audit is already underway in my own Department.

We are in a world where insight and decision-making is increasingly driven by multiple datasets. You have the knowledge and expertise to tell us where data is most useful to business and most valuable to our economic growth and to decide and plan publication of same.

Licencing Paper

I mentioned the work of the public bodies group in relation to the technical framework. Part of the framework and key to the success of the Initiative is having the published datasetsassociated with an Open Licence. This is necessary to ensure the legal grounding for the potential re-use of the data.

There will of course be concerns and issues to consider. I am very pleased therefore to announce that after this seminar, I will be publishing a policy paper on Open Data Licences for 5 week period of public consultation. It will allow the public and private sector alike to consider any issues and feed their views to my officials for consideration. I invite you all to participate in the exercise.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I know you have a busy afternoon ahead of you but I would like to very quickly take this opportunity to thank our speakers this afternoon. Tracey, Rob, Dominic, Deirdre and Evelyn. Thank you.

I would also like to thank you the participants again. Working together we will create an environment where the economic, social and democratic opportunities and benefits of Open Data are recognised and grasped, and where use and re-use of Public Service data by citizens, enterprises and public servants is facilitated and encouraged by public bodies.

Thank you.

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