From: All: Feedback on best practice standard from Open Data IRL Community as requested by Stephan Decker and Deirdre Lee (Insight/NUIG) during hangout on 7 April 2014

What is Open Data?

[OKF] “A piece of content or data is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.” (OKF) Generally, this means that the data should be released in a format that is free of royalties and other IP restrictions.

http://opendefinition.org/

[ODI] Open data is information that is available for anyone to use, for any purpose, at no cost. Open data has to have a license that says it is open data. Without a licence, the data can’t be reused. The licence might also say:

• that people who use the data must credit whoever is publishing it (this is called attribution)
• that people who mix the data with other data have to also release the results as open data under open licenses.

http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data

Why should Open Data be free?

• Open data does not mean that a government or other entity releases all of its data to the public. It would be unconscionable for the government to give out all of your private, personal data to anyone who asks for it. Rather, open data means that whatever data is released is done so in a specific way to allow the public to access it without having to pay fees or be unfairly restricted in its use. (OS)

• (G8 -6) Freely available government data can be used in innovative ways to create useful tools and products that help people navigate modern life more easily. Used in this way, open data are a catalyst for innovation in the private sector, supporting the creation of new markets, businesses, and jobs. Beyond government, these benefits can multiply as more businesses adopt open data practices modelled by government and share their own data with the public.

• (G8 -7) [The G8 agrees] that open data are an untapped resource with huge potential to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex

1. What high-value datasets should be published?

• Geospatial Data (broken out as many different owners for various datasets. Also included is the examples of what is being requested and/or type of metadata needed to make this useful. Where “name” is listed, both Irish & English if available. All data below to include long/lat coords for single point references or shapefiles for area references)
• Postcodes
• Addresses (Full breakdown by building and by structure within e.g. apartments)
• Boundary data (National, County, City, Suburb, Townland, Census SA, Electoral Division, etc)
• Road Network (Ref #’s, names, classification, lit/unlit, bridge info e.g. height’s & widths)
• Topography
• National Maps
• Waterways (Navigation, depths, berths, names, source, underground yes/no, rivers, streams, ditches, lakes  etc)
• Soil data (soil type, acidity, etc)
• Natural Heritage Area’s (boundary, operator, name)
• Bogs (type, protected yes/no, operator)
• Social Facilities (Garda Stations, Courts, Hospitals, Primary Care Centers, GP’s, Dentists, Care Homes etc – name, operator, contact details)
• Sports Facilities (sport, team, operator)
• Schools (patron, mixed yes/no, name, level)
• Voting Stations
• Government offices/departments (name, contact details, under which dept. etc)
• Energy (power plants to include renewables, plant type, power lines, line capacity, substations, reference #’s, names)
• Playgrounds (surface, facilities)
• Crime data (Crime statistics, safety, location of crimes, accidents)
• Health data (Prescription data, performance data, source location)
• Education (List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills)
• Election data (results, location, party, etc)
• Energy and Environment (Pollution levels, energy consumption)
• Finance and contracts (Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent))
• Global Development: Aid, food security, extractives, land
• Statistics: National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
• Government Accountability and Democracy: Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
• Science and Research: Genome data, meteorological data, research and educational activity, experiment results

2. What licences should Open Data Ireland use?

• CC-0 or at most CC-BY version 4
• Public Domain
• GNU General Public License (software)

3. How to engage data users?

• Create a feedback portal for each dataset so that errors & omissions can be fed back to improve the data for all users
• Ensure that there is a mechanism whereby new datasets can be requested. Ensuring requests are not denied/ignored by government agencies may be a function of The Open Data Governance Board, or the Steering and Implementation Group, as the commitment to open data must be monitored and enforced.
• Hackathons
• Open Educational Resources

4. How to encourage data reuse (civic/economic)?

• Set a seed-fund for data driven start ups and civic initiatives.
• Run competitions to see what innovative ways data can be used.
• Develop Application Programming Interfaces (API) to data repositories and publish user documentation to promote easy retrieval.
• Partner with Universities and EU research initiatives to identify data repositories which can be linked.

5. How to evaluate impact?

• Case studies to be performed on most frequently consumed datasets

6. What benchmarking system for Open Data should be used?

• ODI Certification

7. Metadata standards?

• DDI, or ISO19115, or the minimal Dublin Core standard.

8. other?

• We need a general policy which states that ‘Open is the default for information. All information that is open can be accessed free of charge. Exceptions from openness must give plausible reasons and must be weighed against their costs and their effects on the rights to information.’

• Last Meeting of the Joint OGP Working Group between 5 civil society group members and the DPER Team. We were never in favour of these closed group meetings as the only way to communicate on drafting the OGP Action Plan. We raised wider consultation, online channels and more open channels of communication at every opportunity but those were dismissed. This is something we would like to see the Government do better on next time round.

Anyway, we attended all these meetings including the last one and here are the talking points we addressed with the comments and answers received by the Team in the Government Reform Unit.

Details about timeline for OGP Action Plan.

Open Data Section of OGP Action Plan (alternative version shared with DPER prior this meeting):

• To achieve some successes early on our proposal is:

  • 1 day workshop led by DPER project manager with commitment owners – put in place a 6 month project plan to pilot OGP commitments

  • benefit is that you can start with a pilot phase straight after publishing the action plan & can work towards having an agile project plan

  • pilot the portal, pull in Insight, pilot open data training and pilot the change agenda. OKF can help deliver these parts and can help prepare such a project plan. The leanings from this pilot will be great inputs for the overall plan

  • amend commitment 1.5 in the open data piece to put in place a ‘project board’ with a DPER project manager rather than waiting until the capacities have been built for for an Implementation Group or a Governance Board

  • This pilot project board can then be reformed to include the strategy boards in time.

[This idea was largely dismissed] DPER’s reason: DPER is in consultation with Insight and awaiting there report. It’s a good idea, but they are in consultation with Insight and awaiting report from them (x 5 times). But they’ll take ‘something’ out of it into account….

Other points:

• Communication between now and publishing draft & final? Who do we contact in case a question comes up or a timeline needs to be confirmed?

A: “Via email”, but they claim that they “don’t know” what is going to happen next. (It was mentioned that Claire is available till the end of May)

• Will there be 4 weeks of public consultations – terms of this public consultation? May 7th – June 7th? how can people provide feedback? Recommending to publish all feedback from a possible consultation next to the final action plan so that people have the opportunity to understand the impact of their contribution?

A: They “don’t know” yet. They’ll let us know soon….

• Comments on the final draft rec’d Tuesday: we will ask DPER to take into account the comments in the document as well as the alternative suggestions for introductions for when they draft their final version.

A: They don’t have time and capacity to deal with them.

• Will they share the final version that will go to government for approval?

A: Most probably not… There is very little time left… etc, etc..

• OGP Action Plan format: We believe that anything aspirational or not confirmed should be deleted. At this time the plan is way too long and commitments should be made up of bullet points & in plain language including the following items:

  • 2-3 lines description of the commitment

  • Supporting Civil Society Organisations

  • Impact and Vision – 1 paragraph

  • Context – 1 paragraph

  • Timescales for milestones

  • Means – who will drive the commitment and who will challenge

  • Feedback Loop – who will be asked for feedback on progress and how will feedback & progress update be published

  • Grand Challenges – which grand challenges are addressed

I’ve read out all the above points about NAP format loud and clear; and I constantly reiterated that we were supposed to learn from the best practice (and was told “Denis will not give DPER golden medal for this consultation”)

In general, DPER:

• Deeply offended by ‘uncivilized’ comments online

• It’s our first plan… There was not enough time, resources etc. etc.

• Yes, we could’ve learned from experiences of others, but it’s our 1st plan, (why should we…)

• Why we are constantly referring to the UK? We should do it in our own way…

• We don’t know “how good NAP is gonna be at the end”; “may be you will be happy”

Ingo’s introduction was dismissed. Anne’s intro was found favorable. We (CSF) should submit our proposed introduction till next Tuesday, 15 April 2014.

What’s going to happen next? They claim not to know….

Stay focused.

You’ll learn more about our exciting projects that encourage communities to get involved in the worldwide Open Data Movement as well as participating in the civil society aspect of Open Government. Open Data Ireland, with the support of Open Knowledge Foundation, seeks to build projects and regional hubs, sustained by volunteers and, through our regular meetups, hackathons and community-led projects, work to create a sustainable infrastructure within Ireland to promote the values of openness, sector by sector.

Open Data Ireland’s January Meetup in Cork will provide the opportunity to discuss current global trends towards ‘Open Education’. On the day, we’ll have an opportunity to break into work groups and collaborate with others. If possible, please bring your laptop or tablet so you can gain practical experience building and encouraging online collaboration.

This meetup will lead to a hands-on ‘booksprint’ on Saturday, 22nd February (register now), where we aim to create a or, as the name suggests, print a book!

‘Booksprint’ is a rapid and dramatic innovation in getting resources developed by experts through an open and crowd-sourced process. The Open Knowledge Foundation has held two foundation Booksprint to create an Open Education Handbook to be distributed to educators interested in incorporating resources and influencing the way their education system sources learning materials. We look for teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium already in the public domain (‘open’) and work together (‘crowd-sourcing’) to collate the information into a usable format for the general public, or in this case, teachers and educators. Truly an important lesson in civics!

Recently, a group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students wrote a senior cycle secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on a Friday evening and the book was read out on Sunday evening. The result is published with an open CC-BY-license. As far as we are aware, this is the first time a course textbook was written in a three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used before, mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. To follow the progress, visit the repository at Github or the Facebook page (the conversation is mainly in Finnish, but you are welcome to comment and they will gladly answer in English).

This Booksprint is a great place to start contributing and networking with others who seek to accelerate technology in the classroom. Anyone can join!

If you’re new to Open Data Ireland, you’re welcome to just turn up and we’ll introduce you to everyone. With or without a laptop, we’ll introduce you to enough practical information to get you started straight away. Together, we build the community and resources needed to assist students, teachers, and national curricula. We’re hoping to create primary level maths books accessible by anyone, free of charge.

Meetup Details

GitHub: https://github.com/OKFirl/booksprint

Grab a ticket! — At this meet-up we are going to discuss and and begin practical work on collaborative open education projects for Ireland.

Topics include:

• Open Educational Resources, teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium already in the public domain.

• Booksprint: Guidebook for Computing (Primary) and Computer Science (Secondary) Handbook

• Continuing Booksprint on the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Education Handbook

• Overview of how a group of Finnish teachers wrote an open maths textbook in just one weekend.

• Updating opendata.ie and Ireland’s Open Data repository CKAN (Data.OpenData.ie)

• Junior Cert reform and opportunities for Booksprint deliverables to get NCCA approval and reform Ireland’s secondary education system.

Tickets: https://tito.io/open-data-ireland/meetup-12

Bring: Laptop

When: 23 / 01 / 2014 @ 18:00

Where: UCC Cork, Ireland

Who: A number of notable representatives will be joining the discussion including:

• OKF Ambassador for Ireland

• OKF OpenGLAM Ambassador for Ireland

“We are encouraging rigorous Computer Science courses. Although individual technologies change day by day, they are underpinned by foundational concepts and principles that have endured for decades. Long after today, pupils leave school and enter the workplace, long after the technologies they used at school are obsolete, the principles learnt in Computer Science will still hold true.”   -Michael Gove, gov.uk, Department for Education, 11 January 2012

Written by Eugene Eichelberger

Originally posted by Dominic Byrne here

The 10th Open Data Ireland Meetup took place on Thursday 24th October in a new venue at TCube, Castle Street, Dublin. The theme of this meetup was “The Way Forward for Open Data in Ireland”.

Tweets from the meetup have been storified at http://storify.com/Fingal/10th-open-data-ireland-meetup/

Denis Parfenov @prfnv started off our first meetup back after the summer break with a review of the September Hackathon and an Overview of the Agenda for the meetup

5 Stars of Open Data Portals
The first speaker of the evening was Pieter Colpaert @pietercolpaert via Google Hangout who spoke about “The 5 stars of Open Data Portals”  in which he outlined the following maturity model for Open Data portals –

The portal star rating does not require that the datasets within the portal have a corresponding rating under Tim Berners Lee 5 star model for Open Data datsets.  It is an interesting approach and it would be worth evaluating existing Irish Open Data sites against it, including Fingal Open Data.

Open Data Ireland CKAN Portal
Eugene Eichelberger @geichel was up next to talk about progress that had been made to date on the implementation of a CKAN Open Data portal at http://data.opendata.ie/

Data Audit
A report on the Data Audit work carried out at the meetup was then given by Tracey Lauriault @TraceyLauriault .  Tracey talked about the task that the Audit Group worked on at the hackathon – identifying and recording the existence of available public sector datasets.  The group identified and recorded over 160 datasets.  Tracey pointed out that these datasets all originate from various agencies and the very act of creating a new record for the dataset separates it from the authoritative source.  While this may be required in the short term, ideally any Catalogue should point to an authoritative open source.  Tracey pointed out that while it is important to identify as many datasets as possible, ultimately the value lies in use cases for the data.  Tracey also spoke about the work that had been done since the Hackathon on completing Ireland’s return for the Open Data Census.  Tracey questioned the Census methodology, pointing out that any census should be based on readily and equally comparable metrics which are applicable in all countries – a number of the metrics were open to interpretation and in the case of Post Codes, Ireland scored zero for not publishing Post Codes as Open Data even though there are no Post Codes in Ireland.

Dominic Byrne @dominic__byrne then spoke about the next steps for the Data Audit work.  Some tidy-up is required of the datasets, catalogues and API lists as there is some duplication between them; CKAN compatible metadata needs to be captured for the various datasets in preparation for upload to the portal; some work is required to enable importing of existing data catalogues into the portal; a lot of HTML data sources were identified in the audit for which automated scrapers could be built; further datasets were identified after the Hackathon which need to be added.  The PSI licence was also discussed in the context of uploading to CKAN as not everyone considers it to be open to international standards.  Work needs to be done on identifying the areas requiring improvement and feeding that information to the relevant Government Department.  The European Commission currently has a Consultation re Open Data underway until 22nd November, 2013 – including questions re licensing.

Open Government Partnership
Next up were Mick Byrne @themicker1971 and Jason Hare @jasonmhare (via Google hangout) to report on their groups work putting together a proposal from Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland to the Open Government Partnership process.  They proposed that an Open Data Institute (ODI) node should be established in Ireland.  In their presentation they outlined the reasons for an ODI Ireland node and explained the three tiers of ODI nodes.  The final submission is available at http://per.gov.ie/wp-content/uploads/OKF-Ireland-submisison-to-the-Irish-OGP-Action-Plane-edited-2-2.pdf

opendata.ie
The final speakers were Cory-Ann Joseph @coryannj and Jane Ruffino @janeruffino who explained the thinking behind the revamp of http://opendata.ie with a Content Strategy 101 overview .  The site is being designed from a user-oriented perspective (rather than data-oriented), to facilitate a user journey through Open Data Ireland.  They have developed two user personas – (i) regular citizens (Citizen Joe) and (ii) technical/data users (Data Dana) to guide this process.  Cory-Ann and Jane have volunteered to take on the role of gatekeepers for the site while it is going through this development phase.  The overall plan can be found at ttps://sites.google.com/site/opendataie/

OKF Ireland and Open Data Ireland 2013-2014
Denis Parfenov and Flora Fleischer @Daydreamer2105 then proposed a Roadmap for Open Data Ireland including a meetup schedule up to Summer 2014, a schdule of Hackathons and a number of proposed Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland projects.  In particular, over the coming year Open Data Ireland meetups will hit the road with meetups in different parts of the country, starting with Cork in January.  The next Hackathon will be in December with a theme of Healthcare.  Denis also mentioned Code for Ireland which will kick off in November (a Code for Ireland Intro was presented at the Hackathon) and also the need to coordinate various coding initiatives.  In the meantime Code for Dublin  meets weekly to work on various projects.

Denis then faciltated a discussion on the various presentations.  The discussion mainly focussed on the Open Data catalogue and the website – in particular whether opendata.ie should be built as a Portal.  There was a strong argument made that opendata.ie should be about opening up access to Open Data to as many people as possible and equally important in doing so is the way in which the Data and information about the Data is presented e.g. rather than describing it as a Data Catalogue, instead provide a facility to Find Data.  There was general agreement with Cory-Ann and Jane’s content strategy approach.  There was also discussion about other ways in which Open Data could be made more accessible to the wider community.  A suggestion was made of having an Open Data Meetup in a local community where we would work with people in that community on identifying ways in which Open Data could help them and their community.  Tracey talked about how in Montreal the Open Data community had established an advisory board which included representatives from different walks of life and who advised the city in relation to Open Data.

We finished up with the by-now-customary beer and pizza and a great buzz of follow-on conversations.  The general consensus was that it was great to see things moving forward in the Open Data Ireland community.

Meetup #11 will take place on 21st November, 2013 in Engine Yard – details will be available on https://tito.io/open-data-ireland/

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated, to Denis Parfenov and Flora Fleischer for organising and to Pieter Colpaert, Eugene Eichelberger, Tracey Lauriault, Dominic Byrne, Mick Byrne, Jason Hare, Cory-Ann Joseph and Jane Ruffino for presenting.  A special thanks to ESRI Ireland @EsriIreland for sponsoring the venue and refreshments.

Dominic Byrne,
25th October, 2013.

Developers, designers, journalists, academics, policy makers, creative thinkers, civil servants, entrepreneurs and active citizens all came together to revive open data in Ireland and to establish an epicenter for encouragement and development of open knowledge in Ireland by launching the official Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland Local Group.

Groups were formed around 4 specific tasks:

(1) deploying a Central Open Data Portal that provides the people of Ireland with a single access point to the information collected by their government,
(2) auditing and validating existing public domain data for inclusion in such portal,
(3) preparing the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland recommendations for inclusion into the first Irish Open Government Partnership National Action Plan and,
(4) creating an educational hub about the power of open data

On the day, Group 1 managed to secure hosting and deploy CKAN 2.1, and link temporarily to a new portal site (http://ckan.curatedublin.com/) until it redirects to data.opendata.ie. It now comes complete with filestore, datastore, harvester and spatial extensions! Existing and new data sets have been transferred to the new portal. It’s still a work in progress but people in Ireland can now access a list of 275 open data sets about Ireland via the search function.

The second group started early on the day to search, audit and validate all available data pertaining to Ireland. The group searched relentlessly and identified 166 open data sets, 16 open data catalogues and 29 open data APIs available from various websites in and about Ireland. They worked together with Group 1 to determine the metadata requirements, and then proceeded to review and validate the information and usability of each data set. The group explored potential use cases of how the data available through the portal can be combined to find answers to questions that could enhance the lives of the people in Ireland, such as which local school to choose. For people who were new to the Open Data Ireland community this task was a great hands-on way of learning about the issues around open data.

The third group came up with some new recommendations after collectively reviewing the draft report on the consultation for Ireland’s participation in the Open Government Partnership. The group talked through the advantages and challenges around making data public. In their submission to the OGP National Action Plan they recommend the creation of an Open Data Institute Ireland linked to the already well established Open Data Institute in the UK, to catalyse the evolution of an open data culture to create economic, environmental, and social value. (See why we need an Open Data Institute in Ireland.)

Thanks go to ODI’s partner, long-term friend and supporter of the Open Data community in Ireland, CTO of ‘Open Data Solutions’ Jason Hare (Raleigh, NC) for attending and supporting the group in preparation of the submission.

The fourth group did a great job at setting up an intuitive and contemporary website to help the average citizen to understand what open data is, what it can do for us and how we can be empowered by it. The site also gives practical tips on how to get involved. The team set up a Google website, and migration to [opendata.ie](http://www.opendata.ie/) is a work in progress.

The last group made sure that we were capturing this very, very successful CKAN Hackathon for the outside world. The group never failed to fill in and support other groups, providing assistance whenever necessary. A great job was done making it a fun and successful event!

Thanks to everyone who participated in CKAN Hackathon ‘in the room’ or online! Together, we co-founded Open Knowledge Foundation Local Initiative in Ireland on September 28th, 2013!

We now have a flickr site capturing the event in pics and if you’d like to follow-up with what has been happening on Twitter while we were hard at work, you can do that, too, at storify.

The next ‘Open Data Ireland’ meetup will take place in TCube on Thursday, 24th October 2013. Doors open at 18:30

Thanks to Flora Fleischer for collaboration on this post.

Images: Dublin Castle by Wojtek Gurak, CC-BY-NC; CKAN Hackathon by OKF Ireland, CC-BY-NC-SA