It all began with a lunch. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, was invited to Chequers in spring 2009. A government taskforce had just published a report aimed at making Britain a digital world leader and technological reform was in the air. Even so, Berners-Lee was surprised at what came next. “The prime minister asked me what Britain should do in order to make the best use of the internet,” he told Prospect in early January. “I said, you should put all your government data onto the web. And he said, let’s do it.” A month later, Berners-Lee flew in from his base at MIT in Boston for a meeting, this time a cup of tea with Brown in the garden at No 10. He brought with him his friend and colleague Nigel Shadbolt, a professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton University, who works on next generation web technology and has piloted his work on public data. Sitting in wicker chairs, they hatched a plan for a new government team, led by Berners-Lee, to unlock Britain’s public data.
On 21st January this year, less than 12 months later, the government launched a website to do just that (you may have seen the television adverts). Modelled on a similar effort by President Obama, data.gov.uk brings together over 2,500 public data sets, ranging from abandoned vehicles and A&E stats to child tax credits and carbon indicators. And Brown has promised, in a few months’ time, to open up the jewel in Britain’s data crown: the maps made by Ordnance Survey.
“It can be tricky to explain why Tim’s work matters so much,” says dotcom entrepreneur turned government adviser Martha Lane Fox. “But the data he has been able to release can reorder the balance of power between the citizen and the state.” Such claims are often made for “e-government,” whose hype is traditionally exceeded only by the price tags attached to the (often disastrous) IT projects undertaken in its name. But Berners-Lee’s work has the potential to be different, relying as it does on an unprecedented combination of technology experts, amateurs and businesses like Dr Foster or Experian to take the new information and present it usefully. This helps people make better decisions, underpins information-age businesses, and—because it to some degree redraws the boundary between people and government—may also change the terms of politics. Yet perhaps the most remarkable fact is that it happened at all. Others have tried to unlock Britain’s data, only to run into walls of official obstinacy, vested interest and political indifference. So how did Berners-Lee do it?
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Worrying that Pollock’s flawed report with its erroneous assumptions around the price elasticity of demand of large scale map data should be so widely accepted without an ounce of evidence. The assumptions in that report drive the modest numbers in the benefits; changing the elasticity drives down those benefits very quickly. Few acknowledge that there has been a greater than 30% real terms price decrease over the last few years for such large scale maps from Ordnance Survey but that there has been little or no change in uptake! As Nigel Shadbolt himself recently acknowledged the whole area of the economics of geographic information is seriously in need of greater research. No one is suggesting that Ordnance Survey, and particularly its framework of operation known as its public task, doesn’t need revision and that certain key reference data sets such as boundaries, addresses and route networks should not be liberated, but to expect the benefits as anticipated in the Cambridge Study is misplaced at best.
On a rather different note I agree that the release of PSI does have the potential to reframe the relationship between central/local government, the citizen and the third sector. However, there is a long road ahead in that journey as it veers from overly statist to knee jerk reaction, from globalism to hyperlocalism, from perverse disengagement to medieval lynchmob mentality. Individual performance comparators (for example, the speed at which potholes are repaired) are a bogus basis for inveighing against your local authority. PSI has the capacity to overcome rabid single issue agendas by painting the bigger picture (WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org being a valid example) of expenditure priorities but the underpinning statistics (e.g. traffic count, road area, demographics, socio-economics etc etc) that inform those priorities need to be equally accessible for considered debate to ensue. Challenging perhaps but a welcome stimulus for greater community engagement. And, incidentally, one where map data simply provides the framework for aggregating data and, in the web browser (i.e. not OS data anyway), a contextual backdrop to a visualisation of the PSI analysis/mashing.