The government is – finally – hoping to give the public access to its data and resources online, says Claudine Beaumont
While every major organisation, from the BBC to Tesco, has embraced the internet and set about developing new ways of delivering their products and services online, there's one body that hasn't: the government.
Despite its presence in almost every aspect of our daily lives, the interaction between citizens and those in power remains a frustratingly antiquated one-way process online. Yes, people can renew their tax disc over the internet, or adjust their details on the electoral roll, but that's about it.
Those are very passive experiences, rather than a two-way dialogue. It's perhaps indicative that the only really impressive online experience yet masterminded by the Government is the one which allows you to fill in your tax return, and consequently hand over your hard-earned money.
Without question, government is yet to truly appreciate the possibilities of the modern web. There are, however, a few forward-thinking civil servants who are trying to bring about a cultural change within the system
The grandly named Power of Information Task force, established two years ago by one of the first blogging MPs, Tom Watson, is seeking to change the government's attitude to the way non-personal data, such as crime statistics, MPs expenses, lists of schools and public libraries is shared.
The task force believes that by making better use of data, and making it more easily accessible to individuals and entrepreneurs, new and creative ways of displaying or presenting this information will evolve. Hopefully, the relationship between government and its citizens will be improved by the notion of honesty and transparency that such a dialogue might create.
To today's tech-savvy web user, who thinks nothing of participating in online discussion forums, running a blog, sharing photos online, or connecting to friends via social networks, the ambitions of the task force seem like a straightforward, sensible idea. But, says its secretary William Perrin, to many of those within government, this is still quite a radical way of doing things.
Indeed Perrin cites one website in particular - They Work for You (theyworkforyou.com) - as "one of the greatest democratic revolutions of the last five years". They Work for You is a site that pulls together into one place information about the voting habits, expenses claims and contact details of your local MP. (The same team created the government's popular online petition website.) All of this information was always available to the wider public – if they knew where to look – but it only became truly useful and genuinely informative when it was pulled into a single, searchable resource.
Now people can quickly and easily check the work their representatives were doing on their behalf, and felt more able to hold them to account.
"We should be finding other ways to free up non-personal data for entrepreneurs to use government information," says Perrin. Too much information held by government departments exists in isolation, when it would make more sense, and be more useful, if all of this data was amalgamated to create one really compelling source of information, as was achieved by the They Work for You site.
Future developments could include an expansion of the recently trialled "crime maps", which show crime data at a street-by-street level, and compare it to past years. There's also an acknowledgement that while the government excels at creating and gathering data, it's not always sure how best to pass that information on to the public.
According to a recent study by the Department for Education and Skills, 47 per cent of the UK population struggle to interpret raw mathematical or statistical data presented in the form of lists or long tables.
Not only is it dull to look at, but it's hard to understand. Yet almost the entire UK population can easily understand information presented in the form of numbers and symbols, and find it more engaging. That was the thinking behind the crime maps, and it's the same attitude that will power future developments, too. Important information will – hopefully – be conveyed in an interesting way.
The Power of Information Taskforce argues that tech-savvy individuals and web companies should have quick and easy access to this non-personal data, because they're the people with the knowledge and expertise to turn it into something truly useful and engaging to citizens. The fact that the government itself remains at arms length tacitly acknowledges that outside organisations know better how to do the job. Combining information from a variety of sources to create a new way of presenting the data is known as a "mash-up".
A particularly impressive example of this is a website called On One Map, which overlays Google Maps with information gleaned from a variety of other sources to, for instance, draw data about properties for sale from online estate agents websites, and then combine that with information about the nearest supermarkets, secondary schools and mobile phone masts. Information about the location of secondary schools was provided by the government, and details of phone masts were drawn from Ofcom's website.
The crucial thing, however, is that all this information can now be seen, as the title implies. On One Map. The service scythes through the bureaucracy of various government departments. These sort of online innovations don't even need to have mass appeal in order to justify the freeing of data to make them happen, says Perrin.
Another website, Farm Subsidy (farmsubsidy.org), uses information gleaned from Freedom of Information requests about subsidies available to famers, and presents it in an easier-to-use format. It's only recorded just over 3 million searches since December 2005, but that's hardly the point – it's made the searches of those 3 million people far simpler than it would have been had all that information not been pulled into a single place.
So, evidently, there is an appetite among web companies and citizens to make better use of information and data already freely available to us. The government simply has to – belatedly – provide that data in an easy to use way, and the rest will surely follow.
