This blog post was originally written for the Open Knowledge Foundation blog.
Open Data Cities was initiated in May 2009, premised on the simple question of how cities would evolve if all data were made open. Would the same inequalities and asymmetries persist for example? Moreover, what would need to happen within the city to bring about the adoption of more open and transparent practices?
Greater Manchester is a region in the North West of England with a population of 2.8 million people. It comprises of 10 boroughs containing two cities and many large towns. Open Data Cities approached the city as a functioning organism comprising of these 10 boroughs. For the project to have a genuine impact with its inhabitants, we proposed that the project would need to align with how people used the city rather than the ways in which the city was administered. The reality within the city is that although people access services across authorities and whilst there are a number of pan-Greater Manchester public bodies, local authorities still deliver services to tight geographical boundaries.
Addressing the whole Greater Manchester region in this way, created an environment that allowed the project to evolve in a particular way. As the region was adopting City Region status this would require a certain alignment in terms of data and information. The granting of City Region status also opened up the possibility of bringing about an elected mayor, enabling, theoretically, a coherent region-wide strategy to be implemented.
Working across the ten boroughs — all with their own democratically elected councils is not without its challenges. Each public body has its own administrative and data structure and specific set of difficulties. It was therefore necessary to adopt a pragmatic, non-threatening approach as part of our project. Conversations therefore centered around the idea of allowing citizens to look ‘under the hood’ of public service so to speak, of creating better understanding of what councils do. Most importantly we were interested in rebalancing the relationship between public service and citizen and the possibility for services to be delivered with citizens rather than simply to citizens.
Communicating The Benefits
We were often challenged as to how the release of data would benefit the person on the street and who would create the applications and interpretations to allow this to happen. At the start of the Open Data Cities project the Open Data Manchester community was formed to provide evidence that there was indeed a ‘demand’ for the release of open data within the region. We argued that by giving people the tools to understand and act within communities, open data would have broader benefits too. Moreover, there was a growing acceptance that enabling people to access the data and information relevant to their locality was important. This in part has been born out by the emergence of hyperlocal blogging as a means of disseminating news and information at a community level.
Open Data Cities also strongly emphasised the innovation and economic benefits such open data could bring to the region. Opening up the ‘undiscovered country’ of open data, could kick start an economy based on the creation of data services. We had seen examples where companies such as Elbatrop software in London had created best selling applications for San Francisco based on released tree data. If Greater Manchester released data this could present an opportunity for developers to create applications that could have relevance beyond the Greater Manchester region. Research had identified that open data could add £6 billion of added value to the UK economy, how much of that value could be injected into the regional economy?
High value, ‘quality of life’ datasets were identified. Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive now TfGM, made the decision to release large and regularly updated datasets. This sparked a number of good applications but most of them were ‘proof of concept’ with little that could really be considered ready for market. This wasn’t the ‘release the data and people will build cool stuff’ future that we had been promoting, and even though the transport authority had now committed to making data open as a default position, they were very aware that not much was being built.
Acknowledging the Barriers
By talking to people who were involved in Open Data Manchester and the wider Greater Manchester digital community, it became apparent that although open data offered opportunities, there were a number of significant barriers that were inhibiting the development of services. These could be seen as return on investment, risk and liability.
The return on investment argument was quite apparent from early on. People have to make a living and generally want to see their efforts rewarded. By Open Data Cities embracing the 2.8 million people of Greater Manchester it was hoped that there would be enough people to sustain a market in Open Data application development. In order to kickstart this market it was proposed that a number of innovation challenges with sizeable incentives should take place.
It was obvious that there were no large digital businesses in the open data space and we had long held the view that their presence would be an indicator of the health of the open data innovation ecosystem. A suggested reason for the scarcity being that open data licensing was transferring all the risk on to the developer, whereas previously data would be generally released with some sort of service level agreement, none of these guarantees exist with open licensing. The idea of spending large amounts of development time on applications built on data that could then be turned off was deemed too risky.
Liability was also an issue. Who would be liable if someone had bought an application where the data was suddenly turned off or were inaccurate? There were also concerns as to the robustness of supplied data and the sometimes, archaic formats data were supplied in. The liability argument was also been put forward as a ‘supply side’ reason for non-disclosure both from a robustness of data and command and control perspective.
Collaboration
When FutureEverything and Trafford Council began working together on DataGM — The Greater Manchester Datastore, many of the local authorities were in a state of panic through having to negotiate the drastic shortfalls in budget. It was becoming apparent that innovation and citizen empowerment, although appealing were the least of concerns. Public bodies are still in a time of fiscal stress and it has been stated that few, if any, public bodies innovate out of a crisis.
All Greater Manchester local authorities and most pan-Greater Manchester public bodies are represented on the datastore steering group — The benefit of having a local authority leading the project, is their ability to get people around the table. Whilst some members of the group understood the logic of having a datastore and shared intelligence, there was a lot of resistance. Members stated despair at being involved with a project where they didn’t know if they would still be in post in three months time, with others not seeing the point of spending time and resource on something that didn’t have concrete output. There was also a very tangible silo mentality where the idea of shared intelligence across authorities was seen as attractive but not essential.
Evidence and Evolution
As the DataGM project gathered momentum more evidence started to emerge as to the inefficiencies of maintaining a siloed and closed data culture. The servicing of Freedom of information requests costs Greater Manchester public bodies over £4 million a year, over 600 public officials a day are unable to find or use data that they require in order to carry out their jobs — costing authorities over £8.5 million a year. The annoying tendency — for public bodies — of citizens using services outside their borough boundaries also creates difficulties. With no pan — Greater Manchester data initiative it is difficult for public bodies to create and deliver on coherent regional strategies. Open data offers a solution.
Now DataGM is becoming established the economic logic of using a centralised data catalogue, where the data that local authorities use themselves is openly available, is starting to make sense. Open data needs to be transformational. For public bodies enhanced engagement and the creation of innovative services are not enough. We are at a stage where we are saying if you spend A you will get savings of B and with open data you will also gain benefits of C, D, E…
DataGM is starting to develop data release schedules so that local authorities can release similar data in a coordinated way. With developers such as Swrrl — one of the recent winners of the EU Open Data Challenge, some of that data is being expressed as Linked Data. The Open Data Manchester community continues to grow. Although there is still a long way to go with open data in Manchester it feels like more people within public service are starting to see the benefits, and the possibility of Greater Manchester becoming an Open Data City gets closer.