Machinery of Government data

I've been speaking to someone in Central Agencies Shared Services (CASS) who
has a vision of some elements of the machinery of government being accessible
as open data. Multiple agencies with a PDF publishing mentally need to be
enlightened to achieve it...

The goal - to make available data on the following as open, machine-readable
data:
- ministers
- portfolios
- other responsibilities (non-portfolio)
- vote ($)
- appropriations ($)
- departments
- legislation (list not detail)
and all the relationships between all of these.

One key to moving this to a reality is convincing people of the two things -
its worth making this data accessible, and more specifically, there is so much
more that can be done when the data is machine-readable.

What do people think of this idea? - a focused hackathon that aims to do two
thinks: demonstrate what could be done (would require some data transformation
to achieve that); and secondly show what needs to change in what and how data
is presented to be linkable and usable.

Good to read and hear this. It sounds very much like the intent of Commitment
11 in the NZ government’s Open Government Partnership National Action Plan
2019-2020.

Sent from my iPhone

> On 24/01/2020, at 12:02 PM, Paul Stone <<email obscured>> wrote:
>
>
> Open New Zealand
>
> Machinery of Government data
> by Paul Stone
> in The Open Government Ninjas
> I've been speaking to someone in Central Agencies Shared Services (CASS) who
has a vision of some elements of the machinery of government being accessible
as open data. Multiple agencies with a PDF publishing mentally need to be
enlightened to achieve it...
>
> The goal - to make available data on the following as open, machine-readable
data:
> - ministers
> - portfolios
> - other responsibilities (non-portfolio)
> - vote ($)
> - appropriations ($)
> - departments
> - legislation (list not detail)
> and all the relationships between all of these.
>
> One key to moving this to a reality is convincing people of the two things -
its worth making this data accessible, and more specifically, there is so much
more that can be done when the data is machine-readable.
>
> What do people think of this idea? - a focused hackathon that aims to do two
thinks: demonstrate what could be done (would require some data transformation
to achieve that); and secondly show what needs to change in what and how data
is presented to be linkable and usable.

Rest of post

This sounds useful to me, particularly if there is a constitutional or state
sector expert involved as well.

Does anyone know where and how Parliament fits in with Open Government and Open
Data? Are the Parliamentary agencies covered by the charter? It would be great
to have a variety of ways to get into the debates, submissions and journals of
the house.

Sounds like it would also support no.1 from the OGPNAP methinks. Here is the
full list

1. Engagement with Parliament
2. Youth Parliament
3. School Leavers’ Toolkit
4. Making New Zealand’s secondary legislation readily accessible
5. Public participation in policy development
6. Service design
7. Official information
8. Review of government algorithms
9. Increase the visibility of government’s data stewardship
10. Monitoring the effectiveness of public body information management
practices
11. Authoritative dataset of government organisations as open data for greater
transparency
12. Open procurement

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Paddy Plunket

Senior Consultant

+6421918120 | Website<https://www.informationleadership.co.nz/> |
LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/1760517/>

<email obscured>

Rest of post

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Hi Paul,

As Keitha says, the work on OGP commitment 11 touches on this. It is a
surprisingly complex area of data relationships, and I think a data model could
be a valuable first step which could then be followed by a hackathon which
would be built on a more robust foundation.

SSC have a data model of MoG but extending that to Ministers, votes and
legislation is a long haul. My initial recommendation to Victoria (Wray) was
that the core MoG data should be skinny with additional functions (votes and
legislation) being added once the core MoG is operational and visible.

I think the hackathon would be more purposeful if the MoG data from SSC was
already available as open data; the challenge for the hackathon day would be to
show how the various other data sources can be liberated from their pdf jail
and linked to a live open data set. That would be exciting.

Rest of post

Thanks for the shout out Laurence :-)

Yes, I'm leading the OGP commitment 11 work on creating an authoritative list
of government organisational data. The latest blog post on this was published
in December and outlines progress to date. It also links to earlier posts that
go into it in more detail:
https://www.digital.govt.nz/blog/building-blocks-of-digital-transformation/

SSC are poised to release agency name data, which is really exciting. They'll
be doing some comms about it, but I'll make sure I post here too once it is
released.

I'm happy to talk about this work to anyone who is interested. Also, please
feel free to get in-touch if it is something you'd like to get involved with or
contributed to. I've really appreciated the involvement and support from civil
society (as you can read in the blog post).

Thanks all. Yes, Commitment 11 touches on it, and will be useful, but the
vision is to help every understand the power base. For example, when X company
CE meets X minister, what could be impacted from their lobbying. Which reminds
me, we need those ministerial diaries as open data as well.

Still much to do...

Hi Paul,
If that data was available for use at this years GovHack event in Sept it would
find a keen audience. If they could put up award for the best use of that data
it would be a great way of making sure it got some exposure and feedback at the
very least.
Excellent :-)

Absolutely Kevin - GovHack is something to aim for and to help motivate
action...

I agree Ben - I recall seeing Open Corporates present on stage in Geneva back
in 2014 a network diagram of ownership behind Spark (then Telecom NZ) which was
very informative!

Speaking of which - I'm picturing something similar in my mind with this - I
need to seek Aimee's help to figure the data structure to create a prototype...

Yes Ben, I agree, open corporate data is ripe for being made accessible.

One of the GovHack projects last year was using the Companies Office API to
pull the companies/ directors/ shareholders data. They loading it into a Graph
database (Neo4J) to provide an intuitive way of finding relationships and
connections between people/companies and answering questions like what is the
shortest path between person X and company Y (degrees of separation). Or show
me everything connected to compay X or within 2 degrees of X etc. Graph
databases can have such sexy, almost tactile ways of showing networks of
relationships :-)
The team struggled – it turned they only had one of the two API keys needed so
were stuck with one-way relationships and they didn’t get into their video
presentation early enough..., but it was a really good concept and keen engaged
team (50% youth actually).

Yes, that was disappointing. Someone is working very hard on the inside to
shift the culture for us all to get unfettered access...

This is a very late reply to Kevin's post of last month.
"One of the GovHack projects last year was using the Companies Office API to
pull the companies/ directors/ shareholders data. They loading it into a Graph
database (Neo4J) to provide an intuitive way of finding relationships and
connections between people/companies and answering questions like what is the
shortest path between person X and company Y (degrees of separation). Or show
me everything connected to compay X or within 2 degrees of X etc. Graph
databases can have such sexy, almost tactile ways of showing networks of
relationships :-)"

I was wondering about the ethical implications of revealing the personal
position of individuals like this. Even though this can be revealed through a
publicly available register, to present it as a graph makes it easier to use
the information carelessly or maliciously.

Thoughts?

[cid:IL-logo_39d69e57-ea94-4d2a-9877-637e274a35b7.png]

Paddy Plunket

Senior Consultant

+6421918120 | Website<https://www.informationleadership.co.nz/> |
LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/1760517/>

<email obscured>

Rest of post

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This wouldn't be the first time someone has done this, I'm aware of at least
one other effort that integrated the Companies registry and a number of other
data sources into a graph. The integrator made it available only to journalists
and certain data people if I remember correctly, but it is definitely already
out there.

I suspect the ethical question (and probably from a Privacy Act angle too)
would be the distribution, intended use and whether reformatting it in this way
along with other data creates a substantially new dataset.

Having public data hard to access restricts its use to those with power (be
that money or technical skills) and in my mind, inequity of access is the key
ethical issue. I know I am going to sound a bit black and white, but it is
either public or not - changing the presentation layer and lowering barriers to
use does not imply a change of use. That happens with the actual use, so is up
to the end user to follow whatever rules are invented (status quo).

The company’s office data is actually a bit rubbish due to the lack of clear
identification of individuals (no unique identifiers, unlike companies) and it
will be no shock to learn that many people have rather similar names; record
their names differently at different times; and also move house. I wonder if
mixing with new data to improve the unintended inaccuracy of the original data
falls under the ‘creating a new dataset’ issue? Or is it just error correction
facilitating the intended use?

Not sure if everyone's seen that SSC have released what they're calling their
Machinery of Government events data:
https://catalogue.data.govt.nz/dataset/mog-events

If you've got questions - send them to Martin Peak - <email obscured>

This work is continuing as the current OGP National Action Plan has had an
extension due to COVID.

The group of officials and civil society reps have done some planning and we
welcome feedback:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xCBmG9giYgsy9ET_0dbG6A-lVN3nIChpINOyJIzxcuw/edit#gid=0

There's also been work to create a draft data model of the 'machinery of govt'.
Draft data model:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S7eSAEu69ZHjCAigBR2HjoxhJ0kmt-xk

The idea is to unpick these in separate 'deep dive' workshops. Potential topics
are listed here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S7eSAEu69ZHjCAigBR2HjoxhJ0kmt-xk

Please jump into the docs to have a look and provide feedback.

It would be brilliant if this work could be amplified and shared across
networks :-)

thanks for the update and ongoing work, Victoria and others.

Keitha

Keitha Booth
OGP Independent Reporter on NZ's Open Government Partnership National
Action Plan 2016-2018 and 2018-2020
Senior Associate, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria
University of Wellington
Associate, Open Data Institute (UK)
Linked In <https://nz.linkedin.com/in/keitha-booth-b205122b> details
Mobile: (+64) (0)274 454 616 <+64%20274%20454%20616>

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