Promoting Government Data and Information Re-use

One of the reasons for developing the Policy Framework for Government-held Information in the 1990s was a concern "that a culture has evolved that locks government-held information away as a specific departmental asset"³⁷. The policy framework provided the initial guidance for Public Service departments to open up their non-personal information. Web technologies now offer greater opportunities. Publicly available information can be released easily and open authoritative data can be made available for use in new ways. People, businesses and civil society can re-use it to create new products and services.

There has been some recent policy analysis of government information and data re-use. The Treasury discusses the characteristics of knowledge in its paper Innovation and Productivity: Using Bright Ideas to Work Smarter³⁸. It notes that "these characteristics create the potential for markets on their own to fail to deliver the best outcome. First, knowledge can 'spill over' to those who did not create it, resulting in a social return to knowledge creation that is greater than the private return. Secondly, the non-rival nature of knowledge suggests it ought to be made widely available once it has been created".

It concludes that "given these features, there is likely to be less investment in new knowledge and less spreading of it compared to what would be best for society as a whole". It suggests there is "an important and potentially quite active role for government to create the best conditions for innovation, ranging from subsidising public and private-sector R&D, ensuring that institutions for intellectual property rights and higher learning work well, and encouraging strong links between private-sector firms that apply knowledge and public research organisations that create it".

Agencies and sectors are seeking further advice covering:

• quantitative assessment of the potential to create value and growth in the New Zealand economy from opening up public information
• consequential pricing and funding issues
• clarification about Crown copyright and information licensing in a digital environment. They wish to know whether or how to apply licences such as Creative Commons across New Zealand's government-held information
• what machine-readable formats would facilitate re-use through the creation of new products and businesses by third parties

Another potential issue is that the scope of the Policy Framework for Government-held Information only applies to the 35 Public Service departments. Yet, much government-held data is created or managed across the wider State Services, State sector and public sector agencies. Examples are geospatial, meteorological and scientific data, managed by Crown entities, State-owned enterprises or local government. Extending the ambit of the framework to cover these agencies may need to be considered, given user demand to access and re-use their publicly-funded data.

This may also lead to a consideration of machinery of government matters. Section 107 of the Crown Entities Act 2004 provides the capability for the Minister of State Services and the Minister of Finance to jointly direct certain categories of Crown entities to comply with specified requirements for the purpose of both supporting a whole of government approach; and either directly or indirectly, improving public services. E-government is cited as an example. Section 7 of the State Owned Enterprises Act 1986 states that "Where the Crown wishes a State enterprise to provide [non-commercial] goods or services to any persons, the Crown and the State enterprise shall enter into an agreement under which the State enterprise will provide the goods or services in return for the payment by the Crown of the whole or part of the price thereof."

Next Steps

A programme to promote and enable greater re-use of non-personal government information and data in New Zealand is proposed. This would involve working with suppliers and users to understand the issues they have experienced and how they are addressing them. These include pricing, funding, copyright, licensing, and information standards and presentation formats. The outcome of this work would be:

• an approach for opening up New Zealand's public information and data, and
• a report on the impact of this approach on the Policy Framework for Government-Held Information.

Footnotes

³⁷ Policy framework for Government-held information: criteria for stewardship; paper to Cabinet Strategy Subcommittee on Expenditure Control and Government Administration, c 29 June 1998.

³⁸ http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/research-policy/tprp/08-05