Data sharing: venturing into uncharted territory

By Clarice Africa | 27 July 2011 | Permanent link | 0 comments

A few days ago, I attended an Executive Symposium on National and Local Government Spatial Data Infrastructure, part of the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. One of the concepts shared to overcome the challenges of data sharing is to adopt an “Open Library” concept.

When we look at a library, it’s all about borrowing books, the institution itself makes it a point to provide the public with a useful wealth of information to help users enrich their knowledge in a particular subject.

Now say for example publishers or notable authors like {insert your favourite author/s here} keep their masterpieces to themselves, nobody will be able to read them, nobody will learn about {insert what you’ve learned from your favourite author}.

In the same context, if public sector organisations make their data available online to the public, users can browse those data and make valuable use of it. Now, in any case that some of the data is classified or deemed confidential, those are what we call the “reserved books” where users have to ask for special permission to borrow the book.

Having this concept in place, it is important that the government sets in place the necessary mandates or policies to make sure that the “environment” is conducive for sharing data.

Now why do we need to share data? Why do we need to share it to the public? Many people believe that sharing is good, but they often find it hard to articulate the actual social economic benefits of sharing.

In Paul Romer’s New Growth Theory, the American economist argues that innovation and new technologies don’t simply occur by random chance. Rather, it depends on the number of people seeking out new innovations or technologies and how hard they are looking for them.

In addition, people also have control over their knowledge capital (“what to study” and how “hard they should study it”). If the profit incentive is great enough, people will choose to grow human capital and look harder for new innovations.

Simply put it, the more data we share, the more information made available to the public, the more we pave the way towards our economy to be knowledge-based.

Economic growth doesn’t arise just from adding more labour to more capital, but from new and better ideas, supported of course by more data.

Dept of Housing and Urban Development

I also heard from Assistant Secretary Raphael Bostic of the US Housing and Urban Development, who shared some insights on how public sector organisations can garner support for open data sharing and its other GIS initiatives.

According to Bostic, policy makers often have no expectations that GIS and maps should be useful or could be useful in decision making.

“They have no expectations or whatsoever. They’re happy about what is does but that doesn’t lead to an on-going engagement expectation that leads to a decision-making paradigm,” he said, adding that technologists, many of them have little to no understanding of what it means to be actually useful.

“When the tech guys talk, the policy people’s eyes glaze over and they’ll be like what are they talking about?”.

(I am sure we’ve all had experience of this.)

“Policy people talk in non-specific way about general issues, that’s why a lot of it boils down to the importance of language, most people have no idof ea what some technical terms mean, for example, enterprise, what does it mean to be an enterprise? How about cloud? Do people know why it’s useful?”

Bostic said that in the US, there is this notion for the need to have a single GIS platform: “they’ve been working on this platform for five years and nobody knows it exists save for the 45 people involved in it.”

“One of the challenges is to have policy makers recognise its value and be willing to invest in it,” Bostic continued. “We need to try to be more purposeful in creating a GIS infrastructure that provides solutions, so what I decided to do is to develop the necessary tools and show it to fellow policy makers and let them have a first-hand experience on how it will actually help public services to be more impactful.”

Cultivating a supporting mindset I think is important for public sector organisations as it determines how they will get to achieve maximum efficiency and maximum effectiveness. And how do we cultivate this mindset?

The willingness to share data, or the lack thereof, is one of the biggest challenges confronting public sector organisations. Some of the US government officials I spoke to told me it made them want to bang their heads against the wall out of sheer frustration.

This refusal is partly driven by the fear of ‘letting go’: that once the data moves from their custody, it may be used wrongly, and that they will be liable for the consequences. I believe it’s also driven by a failure of imagination: a hesitation to greenlight data sharing unless the specific use of that data is mapped out in advance.

There are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns - the most successful value-for-money public sector initiatives that I came across during the ESRI User Conference in San Diego were the result of civil servants setting aside fear and hesitation in order to venture into unknown territory. Data sharing may be outside your comfort zone - but increasingly it’s the path to delivering genuinely transformational outcomes.