Supporting Government openness, transparency and empowerment through open data (GBSC0003)

Commitment ID

GBSC0003

Commitment Title

Supporting Government openness, transparency and empowerment through open data

Problem

Scotland's Digital Strategy sets our ambition to be a data driven nation. We value the transformational role that data can play in increasing transparency, empowering communities, transforming products and services, fuelling innovation and improving outcomes.

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of data in saving time, money and lives. Publishing and internal sharing of open data enables efficiency gains, cost savings and service improvement. We want to make more of our data available openly and make public sector data easy to find. People, businesses and developers can use open data to create products for decision making at a variety of levels.

The data we publish must be accessible and meet users’ needs, provide insight and support decision making. Different audiences have different needs. Our approach must be informed by an understanding of these needs and directed towards supporting outcomes, lessening the burden of data use and reuse.

We need to find a way of connecting with users who are not engaged with data, by considering equalities and skills. We recognise the value of supporting other open government themes through data; e.g. people being empowered to use data to understand and make decisions to reduce their impact on global warming.

The way public services make decisions using data is as important as the data they publish. This includes the use of trustworthy, ethical and inclusive Artificial Intelligence, as outlined in Scotland's AI Strategy.

Status quo

Scottish public bodies publish a wide variety of data, much of it in reusable formats. We know that this is highly valued by an engaged and energetic community of users.

We also know that many people cannot find the data they are looking for. In some cases, they do not know what data exists or how the data is defined and described. This means that they cannot easily use and reuse data to help them make informed decisions. We know that to create value for communities and businesses the data must be relatable to create insight, but many may lack the skills and confidence to take action.

We also know that people find some open data platforms difficult to use - their skill level or needs are unmet. We acknowledge that people often cannot adequately access data to inform or answer the questions they have.

Reducing the amount of time people spend trying to find the data will release more time to help answer some of our nation’s biggest questions, aiding decision making on challenges that Scotland is tackling.

There are varying levels of data maturity and data literacy across organisations who produce data. These differences can create organisational barriers to opening up data.

Many people are unaware of or unclear on the use of AI in the Scottish public sector. Developing an AI algorithm register will allow people to understand and influence public sector applications of AI, and help earn their trust, which is essential to the delivery of Scotland’s AI strategy.

Action

Over the four years of the plan, we’ll apply an enabling methodology to develop open data infrastructure and share examples of the value generated from use cases across a series of thematic areas to support plan commitments, including:

• Discovery: learn from best practice
• User needs: understand user needs
• Identify and share use cases
• Commit to continuous improvement
• Data needs: support connection between data users and producers to improve data usability

We will:

1 – open up data relevant to other open government themes, such as key climate change datasets used by government for modelling and reporting, data on public transport and public sector expenditure

2 - run a CivTech challenge to evaluate if technology can make public sector data easy to find, assess outcomes and set out the way forward

3 – set up the Data Transformation Framework (DTF) stating what ‘good data’ looks like and the process by which organisations can improve – this focuses on opportunity for organisations to improve data maturity, data literacy and adoption of standards, through collaboration and engagement with local government and other public sector bodies, to be useful for civil society

4 - review the front end of our official statistics open data publishing platform

5 - increase the amount of Scottish public sector open data being published, through collaborations such as the Data Standards and Open Data Community of Practice

6 - develop a public register of AI algorithms

How will the commitment contribute to solving the public problem described above?

1 

• Increase number of useful open datasets to help people better understand and make decisions on thematic policy areas

2 

• People able to search for and discover the public sector data they need using natural language
• Data are discoverable, both from portals and websites
• We can identify gaps in the data we publish based on user searches

3

• Improve and enable data reuse in the Scottish Public Sector
• Develop the DTF, outlining realistic and measurable maturity stages, setting out what ‘good data’ looks like and the process by which organisations can improve
• Identify a Data Maturity Assessment model which will help Public Sector organisations understand their current data status and plan steps for data improvement

4 

For statistics.gov.scot, an increase in:

• Products built using data from the site
• Success in task completion rate

5 

• More public sector datasets being published in an open format
• Sustained positive collaboration amongst public sector bodies to open up their datasets
• Use cases showing benefits to opening access to data

6 

• Public has understanding and agency over how AI is used to help make decisions
• Scottish Government and partners can develop public trust, so AI can benefit society, economy and public services
• Constructive dialogue between people and policymakers, developers and users of AI systems and processes in the public sector; contributing to improved design and implementation of AI

What long-term goal as identified in your Open Government Strategy does this commitment relate to?

We have recently published a number of strategies and commitments, such as Scotland's Digital Strategy and Scotland's AI Strategy. Within these strategies, we recognise and value the transformational role that data and AI can play in increasing transparency, empowering communities, transforming products and services, fuelling innovation, and improving outcomes. The purpose of the data commitment within the Open Government Action Plan is as an enabler: to align and implement the ambitions within these strategies in line with Open Government principles.

By focusing on thematic areas in support of the action plan, we will connect open data with the value we are seeking to create. This will drive greater engagement across civil society and government and create a clear alignment across the Open Government Action Plan.

Primary Policy Area

Open Data

Primary Sector

Public Services (general), Science & Technology

What OGP value is this commitment relevant to?