Opening Up is an Interreg IVb project on Open Data and Social Media. This project ended on the 3d of december 2014.

Social media are now part of our daily lives. A first assignment for a local government is to use these social media channels in their own communications. A second, much more difficult task for local governments, is to organize their own processes to be able to listen to what citizens, businesses and organizations, using the same social media, are saying about the municipal service delivery. By promoting dialogue and combining technology and interaction these media have become extremely valuable networks for citizens and consumers. Along with a more open style of communication, there is an increasing move toward the opening up of information, primarily through the formal and informal release of large datasets (e.g. by data.gov.uk in the UK, overheid.nl/opendata in the Netherlands and data.gov.be in Belgium).

The challenge for governments and companies is to create custom tools and approaches to work with this information and integrate their services with social networks. Opening Up aims to help them develop innovative services through the use of open data and to encourage smart use of social media. In the project, eight European regions around the North Sea will test new methods, set up training, and develop ad hoc applications.

The Opening Up objectives included:

• Develop transformational citizen-led services through the use of social media approaches.
• Integrate social media into government and business service delivery
• Spearhead the adoption and use of open data by governments and businesses
• Set up an accredited training programme on social media
• Extend the European Service List to include new social media channels
• Build a community of practitioners in the NSR aimed at promoting the adoption and use of social media in government-citizen, government-business and government-government relations
• Build instruments to measure an organisations capacity to use social media to develop relationships with their stakeholders 

Partners from the project were:

The use of standards and core reference data for linking open data

Local open data is most useful when like datasets from different localities can be identified, compared and combined.  This is complicated where power is devolved down to regional and local government, as consistency of open datasets cannot be mandated across a country or the EU as a whole.  However mechanisms can be implemented to aid local governments in aligning where they see public and mutual advantage in doing so.

Open standards make it possible for citizens and entrepreneurs to access data consistently in a multitude of apps or APIs, compliant with the architecture of an open platform.

Publishing open data in geographical information systems (GIS)

In a world of constant change, excess information and constant monitoring, maps are increasingly important for displaying information and giving statistics geographical context. For local government, the distribution of funds, investment, services and more besides has always been up for political discussion: who is getting what? People want to know reasoning and evidence behind wealth distribution?

Can decision-makers ever make objective choices based on numbers alone? As the volume and quality of available data continue to grow, administrations and companies are in a position to improve the quality of their decisions. Several of the partners in Opening Up have collaborated to assess the best ways to use open data in internal planning and proposals; they have also explored how data can inform performance indicators at different geographical levels of the locality. 

Open data to inform the management of local government

For local public management, all decisions are based on available information. The number of publicly available sources are vast, but there may be differences in the data or numbers that, in principle, should be the same. This may be due to time differences, statistical sample sizes, definitions of populations or other factors.

To have consistent data should be a primary objective, but it is not simple to achieve if data and statistics are not standardised by a centralised unit or trusted competence.

In many situations, we can see that data and statistics are used in a selection and form that suits a purpose, rather than providing an objective view. This can be a problem since the data may vary over time and what can be supporting one point of view at one time may, due to a different focus of almost the same data, be supportive of different views. This has been a major problem in using data for monitoring development and changes over time. There has also been political and administrative frustration since the standardisation of data and statistics has not been set.

In a project now running as part of the Opening Up project, Kristiansand will focus on getting a set of data to be used in indicators and for analysis, maintained and updated over time. This will be an opportunity to gather open external data and internally produced data (also open) to inform local government in a precise and consistent manner, while helping to build trust between the administration and politicians.

Another issue with data is that politicians are frequently questioned by journalists, special interest groups and different lobbyists regarding data they have obtained that is not necessarily open. The more data is available and ready at hand, the better the politicians (and administration) will be at handling matters like these.

To be able to have open data, open sources and open processes in decision-making, planning and ad hoc situations will increase transparency in local government and this will lead to improved trust between the population and local government.

Some examples of how open data can be used to inform the management of local government in partner countries and municipalities are described in the rest of this document.

Gathering, transforming and publishing open data

Open data is a huge resource which can make life easier for many people. When data is opened up, the owners of the dataset may no longer need to answer questions about the data because journalists and members of the public can find the answers to their queries themselves. Businesses and entrepreneurs can also use the data to develop commercial applications while the public can gain access to a whole host of information.

Open government data also significantly increases the transparency and accountability of the public sector organisations who generate the data.

However, to publish open data in the first place there is a whole process which needs to be undertaken:

• Data needs to be collected together, possibly from a variety of sources
• Standards for publication need to be defined
• The data needs to be transformed to comply with those standards and into a format that can be easily used
• The data needs to be published in a central resource where people know to look for it

Publishing open data can be as simple as putting a pdf of a dataset online such that people can download and look at the data. However this does not allow anyone else to use the data and develop tools which show the data in different ways – at least not without a huge effort to recreate the dataset in a reusable format.

In an ideal world, all open data would be published as open linked data, meaning like datasets from different sources could be merged and compared.

In between these two options are a number of ‘half way’ stages which represent improvements over the basic pdf approach, but do not provide fully linked data. These stages can be identified in the accepted five star model. Each of the start stages is described in the table below.

Publishing Open Data in Local Government – Drivers and Barriers

Giving citizens and businesses access to public sector data and the tools necessary to use it can reduce the demand on municipalities to answer queries.

Where data is openly published, people can develop applications that make use of it and build businesses around such applications. Citizens and other organisations can use these applications to access the data in innovative ways so that information is easily accessible to them.

However, the lack of any common practice and standards for publishing and accessing public data can constitute a barrier for both businesses and citizens. Many businesses and entrepreneurs do not know that specific data exists, while many authorities are not aware of the potential benefits from permitting private re-use of their data.

Among public sector organisations, there are differing views on giving private sector companies access to public data. People are also debating how easy this access should be, what it may cost, and under what conditions it can and can’t be used. These legal and privacy barriers to open data need to be broken down.

Innovation and entrepreneurship through Open Data

Publishing data from local government is useful in itself. However, the real power of the data and what it can tell you about a local area is usually most appreciated when other organisations develop tools and applications to present the data in ways that make it easy for other people to understand.

Once data is made available, it is open to businesses (often small and medium enterprises, SMEs) to analyse it and then create revenue from selling their analysis, or by developing and selling tools that use the data. Such innovation and entrepreneurship can help to drive the improvement of local government services, with little or no cost to an administration other than that of releasing the data for public consumption. Governments in many partner countries are seeking to promote innovation by organising activities such as hackathons, developing case studies and encouraging local governments to increase the amount of data they make available. Some examples of how open data has been or could be used in innovative ways through entrepreneurship in partner countries and municipalities are described in the rest of this document.