2 weeks left to provide views and comments on the 1st Irish OGP Action Plan!

Why Now:

The Open Letter was formulated and signed by the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland in conjunction with a host of Irish & International FOI subject matter experts, national and international organisations specializing in freedom of information and government transparency and a host of individuals and group members that see the need to finally #abolishFOIfees in Ireland.

You can still sign if you feel strongly about FOI and AIE fees. Please sign in the comments section and we pull your signatures into the list periodically in the run up to the May Regional OGP Conference that takes place in Dublin Castle (register)

We are trialing a new form of weekly updates where we aim to keep you posted and highlight what we found interesting, impressive, disappointing, exciting, and so on. All of these will usually be related to projects that we are currently working on. – Commenting encouraged.

Exciting …!

Denis on our team is working tiredly to organise the Civil Society Day as a fringe event to the official European Regional OGP Conference that takes place 8-9th May. More info coming in the next weeks, but it looks to be a great networking evening with topical & focussed 15 min talks.

Interesting …

William Beaussang the Head of the Government Reform Unit and part of our weekly joint working group meetings with DPER has written a piece on Ireland’s OGP journey. Here is the link to the blog post on the OGP website where you can actually comment. They won’t let you comment on their own press release.

Disappointing!

Department of Public Expenditure and Reform have told us they do not have time to research best practices around introducing programming and coding as compulsory in our schools. First of all – thanks for letting us know that there is no time to research citizen requirements! Second of all, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY – what the heck?! There’s a tech revolution going on and Ireland doesn’t want to take the chance to jump on the band wagon now? The UK are doing it from September this year. Estonia is teaching its 7- year olds for years!!

Appointments – always free to attend if interested

1/4/2014 – Weekly meeting with the OGP civil society group. 3/4/2014 – weekly meeting of the joint working group to draft Ireland’s 1st OGP Action Plan. 5/4/2014 – Meeting with OGP Conference planning group. Don’t worry – we’ll have all of those covered if you don’t fancy 3 meetings a week. We keep reminding people to utilize ‘The Online’ – but the change is slow or non-existent. 5/4/2014& 9/4/2014 – Meetings with Dept.s of Environment and Justice.

OGP Action Plan

[27/3/2014] We had our 7th meeting with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) to discuss the latest draft of the OGP Action Plan which the civil society group had consolidated the Tuesday beforehand. Still very much work in progress but DPER has agreed to continue their work and flesh out the commitments under consideration of the comments made by citizens which you can see in the draft. All DPER Action Points from the meeting of the joint working group.

[25/3/2014] We also met with other OGP ninjas at our weekly civil society meeting. Our notes.

What’s on our Reading List

Flora: Working on an open letter to Minister Howlin asking to drop FOI fees – so it’s been all about FOI last week. Says it all – The letter sent to Minister Howlin by Access Info Europe & the Center of Law and Democracy last year after reading this and this. 

Denis:  14-Year-Old Proves U.S. Can Save $370 Million by Changing Fonts. He also read How to ensure #opendata policies are being implemented w/ the public interest in mind? Enter the Open Data Ombudsman 

Salua: There is only one problem… to old (2010) …but really interesting! Salua also talks about the Civil Society Day we told you about earlier on her own blog – little bit more info than what we have given you above!

Weekly Twitter Snapshot

Tweets about “#OGPirl OR from:@OGPirl OR from:@OKFirl”

4th April 2014, 2.30pm, Custom House – Meeting with Department of Environment on Aarhus and citizen participation

9th April 2014, 11am, 94 St. Stephen’s Green – Meeting with Department of Justice on UNCAC and official secrets

Click to Attend

The group of citizens and civil society organisation involved in collaborating on Ireland’s OGP Action Plan have asked for these meetings to discuss further the opportunities for more citizen participation, transparency and accountability in and of government. As these will be the overarching themes for the conversation. But all interested citizens, organizations or business are welcome to attend. If interested you MUST indicate your attendance by adding your name to via the link above. If you are interested but cannot attend in person you can also add your questions to the same document.

Click Here if you would like to review the current draft of the 1st Irish OGP Action Plan. Please note this is a work very much in progress and the document is open for commentary. We will raise commentary to the Dept. of Public Expenditure and Reform and ask that it be considered when preparing the Action Plan.

The event took place from 10am – 7pm so we got a lot of work done even with great food for lunch and dinner in between!

Here are members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland (OKF Ireland) giving you the lowdown of what happened at Open Data Day Dublin:

What is Open Data Day?

International Open Data Day is a community initiative to make and spread open data. 150 events world wide where participants gather online or in person to make things with and around open data. Open Data day in Ireland has been organised by and for the Irish community and anyone was invited to get involved. 70 participants in total took part in Saturday’s event and their time and expertise proved invaluable as we were able to progress greatly with their help and were able to build teams aro

und specific projects.

What did you work on?

Volunteers worked on a couple of pre-defined projects but also had a chance to work on new projects pitched on the day. The beauty of those events is that you are putting anyone with an idea or a particular problem together into a room with someone or a group of people who can help you and others solve this problem with the expertise and technology we have available today.  You’re essentially able to build teams around projects and co-create solutions.

So there were 4 main strands of projects that volunteers took part in on Saturday:

1. A book sprint to create a open license and free of charge textbook for programming in Irish schools
2. A public policy project where people could get involved in shaping Ireland’s 1st OGP Action Plan (Ireland committed sign up to the Open Government Partnership in 2013)
3. A data audit and analysis project with the goal to visualize for the masses what open data can do for us
4. The creation of a set of civic apps.

Did you make any progress? What are your achievements and what are the outcomes of this type of event?

Yeah, sure – we are actually quite impressed with the progress we made in the respective teams. It really shows what you can make happen when you bring people together. Sure we may not always have a finished product at the end of the day but the most important thing is to bring people together, start collaborating and establish a team over the course of the day. The web allows many of the involved and interested to continue work remotely.

So we really want to give you an insight into what we – citizens and subject matter experts – were able to do as part of each of the projects on Saturday. So here it goes:

Booksprint: Textbook in ‘Programming’ for Irish Schools

The book sprint brought together a group of people, including a number of teachers to contribute to an open license textbook on programming for inclusion as a junior cycle optional short course as announced by Minister Ruairi Quinn last year. As an open source book it will be a free of charge teaching resource to all kids and schools in Ireland. Being free of charge parents, students, and anyone else can also benefit and get started with coding following a structured curriculum at their own time. Saturday’s book sprint sparked intense collaboration with participants becoming readers, writers, editors and publishers for a day and they have formed a team that will continue to finish the book working remotely. So far the team have added content to 4 chapters of the final textbook which are laid out to contain all resources a textbook normally needs to be accepted into schools: curriculum, teacher guide and lesson materials. Once all content has been collated the open source software Booktype will help the team to upload the chapters and produce the textbook. We made a lot of headway on Saturday and appreciate that teachers lent their expertise to create something valuable that will be available and will address the growing need to teach our kids computer programming and digital literacy. Elon Musk – business magnate, investor and inventor – founder of SpaceX and Paypal and CEO of Tesla Motors attended Web Summit 2013 in Dublin last year and reiterated that in order to compete, Ireland needs to make sure to build and retain innovative talent on it’s shores. Let’s do just that.

Public Policy Project:  Ireland’s 1st OGP Action Plan

 This requires a good bit of background on this topic first: In 2013 Ireland committed to signing up as a full member to the Open Government Partnership. By participating in the OGP governments are asked to commit to an open data strategy, share information about their activities openly, increase the level of participation citizens can have in decision-making, and to use new technologies in an effort to make public data more openly available as a means of transparency and accountability. To become a full member and demonstrate commitment Ireland will need to co-create an OGP Action Plan with civil society and attempt to deliver on the commitments it outlines within a 2 year time-frame. Members of OKF Ireland have originally pushed the government commit to sign up to the OGP, have been part of the public consultations in 2013 and are now participating in a joint working group with representatives from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that is set to co-create this action plan. The Draft Plan is to be presented at the  European Open Government Partnership (OGP) conference held on May 8th & 9th at Dublin Castle. We believe that civil society and citizens now have an opportunity to shape that action plan and so we build it out as a project for citizens to participate on Saturday.

And so here is the progress we made on Saturday, and we really have to thank the interested citizens that just came in on the day, lent their expertise and are now part of a project team for making it work so well!

1. We established a Project Team sourced from volunteers that attended this project group. So now we can continue work remotely with a couple of doughnut and coffee meet-ups in between – this is great stuff!
2. We developed a framework for analysis of the evolving draft national action plan. The framework is based on learning from other best in class OGP Action Plans both in terms of what needs to happen to really open up data and government and how it can be achieved. The framework will allow us to assess the current Irish draft and inform the joint working group, the representatives of the Government Reform unit and the wider civil society on how the Irish plan compares to what is recommended by the OGP and what is working internationally.
3. And we created a template – compared a set of best practice OGP Action Plans and developed a template that can be used to formulate commitments for the Irish Action Plan. Template will make sure that commitments are concrete, measurable, achievable and include important milestones. Will help us understand what success looks like.

And lastly we hooked up with our friends from Open Data Science Ireland (ODSI) to continue work on a pretty awesome open data audit project for Ireland.

Irish Open Data Sources – Audit and Analysis

One of the goals of OKF Ireland is to create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.

At Saturday’s event we partnered up with members of Open Data Science Ireland and continued work on a data audit that was started by members of Open Data Ireland and Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland last year. This is now the most extensive list of open data sources related to Ireland with 29 APIs, 16 catalogs, and roughly 160 data sets. We were able to collect and add more information about the data sets to increase understanding of what data is available, what the quality of that data is and most importantly which type of public data is missing. Members of the ODSI have also been able to identify a number of good example data sets that can be used for a project with OKF Ireland to analyse and showcase to citizen what type of information can be extracted from the data is available and how it can help them make better informed decisions in their day to day lives.

Finally there were teams who attended the last Code for all Ireland meet-up in January and they joined and recruited volunteers for the development of some awesome civic apps.

Civic Apps Projects

There were some really good ideas out there and teams continued work on realizing those ideas vigorously! It’s great to see these apps develop over time and people putting in the effort to really make something out of an idea. One of the Apps maps the locations of defibrillators across the country and also map locations and contact details of those trained to use the equipment – if someone had a heart attack anywhere near you – would you know where to find the nearest defibrillator? We think this has a lot of potential and the great thing is that the team is going to crowd source the locations of the defibrillators with a competition where people send in selfies next to a defibrillator. A second App would list current queuing times at local public service customer service locations (eg motor tax office, passport office etc and therefore facilitate an informed choice for customers seeking to use these services. E.g. if the App says there’s an hour wait at your local motor tax office either wait till later of go elsewhere for a coffee! Finally there was a pitch to transforms successful decision making software used by Dublin City Council last into an app that can be used by anyone and help make majority decisions in an instant. All great projects and we’re happy to have teamed up with Code for all Ireland.

So that’s it – that’s what we did Saturday! It sounds a lot and it was a lot – we are really impressed with what was achieved!! Big thanks to everyone for doubling down for that one day of the year.

So you teamed up with other groups to make this event happen? How do you organize an event like that?

Yes, the event was co-organised by a number of civic minded volunteer, professional and civil society groups in Dublin highlighting that collaboration can lead to great events that bring communities together. Open Knowledge Foundation worked together with Open Data Ireland, Code for All Ireland, Open Data Science Ireland and Code for Dublin to build out the different project break-out sessions. The event was also kindly hosted and sponsored by Facebook Headquarters and Microsoft in Dublin – a huge thank you to them for making it happen.

You are happy with the outcomes of the event?

Yes, very. It was great to see everyone come together for that one day and collaborate, create and make something happen that is valuable to our society as a whole. It’s like people appreciate giving something back and we really appreciate that they take the time and put work into those type of civic projects that can help make a difference to our fellow citizens.

Anything that would have made the event even better?

Well, one of the things that we would like to see is an understanding on behalf of our government of this type of volunteer culture, hackathons, data days, civic working groups and interested citizens and how it can contribute in a meaningful way to improving services for citizens and to help address real issues that citizens care about. We would like to see a much closer relationship between the government and those groups to foster a sustainable model of citizen participation. We see this as something the government can explore as their next steps and so it would be nice to see representatives at some of our events in the future. This would enable us to talk through how government and citizens can improve services and requirements for open data together, learning from each other. But we are working on that, and we’ll keep inviting them!

Ok, please do! Last question – who makes up the OKF Ireland team – in case we want to get involved in any of the projects you’ve been working on?

Sure, no problem. Anyone who considers themselves an interested citizen we are interested to talk to and hear their opinion on what we are doing in the public eye. We particularly want to learn what our ordinary citizens think but also appreciate any insights or contributions from businesses, interest groups, subject matter experts, other organisations because we know citizen participation is limited and so we’d like to harness those views and use at the forums that we participate in. So our team is: Denis Parfenov, Flora Fleischer, Eugene Eichelberger, Salua Nassabay, Ingo Keck. All our contact details are on our Local OKFN Group Profile. Please feel free to contact anyone on any of the project mentioned. We are all open and share all our information!

Thanks again and great Open Data Day 2014!

Media Coverage:

Newstalk – Innovators to write Irish schools’ first coding and programming textbook today

TheJournal.ie  – A coding textbook for Irish secondary schools could be written in one day

Links:

https://twitter.com/OKFirl

http://OKFirl.org/

Open Data Day 2014 Storified

What will it look like you ask? – Some pictures from an Open Data Hackathon we held last September. This Feb. 22nd Open Knowledge Foundation are organizing a book sprint to create an open source and free to use textbook for schools that will help kids get coding and computing. A skill we all know they’ll need now and to build the future. Anyone can take part, we need lots of good souls who want to collaborate and contribute to this awesome project!

In collaboration with @codeforall_ire who have kindly organised the venue and will be making sure food & drinks encourage you to stay for the day! They will also continue work on their app projects if you want to jump on one of their teams.

We are also teaming up with Open Data Science Ireland (@ODSIrl) in order to hack on open data sets and create meaningful stories from data that can highlight the benefit of open data to the mainstream public, average Joe and public service. We are looking for both people who have problems and questions and people who can make sense of data to answer exactly those. Sign-up or contact either OKFirl or @ODSIrl

Members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland, ActiveCitizen, Digital Rights Ireland, An Taisce, TASC/TI Ireland and one unaffiliated citizen have met with DPER and will take part in a series of working group meetings with representatives DPER to co-create Ireland’s 1^st OGP Action Plan over the next 3 months.

During the 1st meeting of the members of the working group set out the process of how DPER is going to work together with the civil society group and vice versa and created a list of actionable next steps to agree on the commitments the government should make in the 1^st Irish OGP Action Plan. The list is below and has kindly been provided by Evelyn from the government Reform Unit.

In 2013 the government awarded a 12 week contract to TI Ireland to lead a set of public consultation meetings which produced the a report outlining 62 requested commitments + 10 separate submissions. Those were categorised to address the four core principles of open government as recommended by the Open Government Partnership: transparency, citizen participation, accountability, and technology and innovation. But in an initial meeting in October 2013 DPER concluded that the result was not focussed enough and commitments now needed to be prioritized. From experience good OGP Action Plans contain 8-10 actionable and achievable commitments and the aim of the working group is to now co-create such a sound OGP Action Plan.

At the meeting Denis Parfenov, founder of ActiveCitizen and  Ambassador of The Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland reiterated that involving the wider civil society in the development of the national Action Plan is a critical step in improving the dialogue between citizens, civil society and government. This in turn is one of the primary aims of OGP and is an important enabler for a more open government and citizen participation in policy making. With regards to the traditional way of public consultations Denis dittoed that we have a great opportunity to do things differently this time by engaging the public and advertising widely, have an open and transparent process of co-creating Ireland’s first OGP Action Plan and allow for unorganised participation through available online tools.

For the 1st Open Data Ireland Meetup in 2014 (Meetup #12) which took place last Thursday 23rd January the OKF Ireland Team traveled to Cork, sparking the first Open Data Ireland Event outside Dublin. The event took place at University College Cork which kindly offered to host the meetup where everyone had a chance to catch up with with what’s happening in their jurisdictions. And we had 4 great speakers on the evening:

• Joonas Mäkinen (Finnish Maths Book Sprint)
• Marieke Guy (Open Knowledge Foundation)
• Darius Whelan (Creative Commons Ireland)
• Denis Parfenov (Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland, Ambassador)

The theme of this meetup was “Open Education”.

Tweets from the meetup have been storified at http://storify.com/OKFirl/open-data-ireland-meetup-12-open-education. Before we forget, please add your comments, tips, ideas for how we can drive open education in Ireland in the comments below.

Denis Parfenov started off our first meetup in 2014 by recalling what the OKF network does, what the local group does in Ireland, why we need an Open Data Movement in Ireland and how you can get involved and support that movement (last slides). You can access these slides by clicking on the picture below.

This was followed by an inspiring story by Joonas Mäkinen of how a group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students wrote an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a weekend book sprint. Click the picture to follow the link to the life size video conversation we had with Joonas.

Following that  Marieke Guy shared her expertise about working on the LinkedUp project which is all about pushing for public, open data to be be used and exploited by educational institutions. Marieke had some great insights on how to use open data for educational needs.

Finally it was good to learn from Darius how open education and open publishing ties in with with the objective of Creative Commons that the local group is promoting in Ireland. Mainly a Creative Commons license “helps you share your knowledge and creativity with the world” by choosing the right licence that meets your goals but also enables re-use and thereby “maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.” This is how Finnish student in Finland are now able to use an open source mathematics book and free of charge.

Darius recommended to look up the below mentioned 30 min video to learn more about this.

We finished up with conversations and discussions around open education and how to overcome obstacles to it in Ireland getting some great ideas and thoughts for our Open Education Hackathon in February.  The general consensus was that it was great to see that there is a demand for Open Education both outside and inside of Ireland and it was great to learn from Joonas and Marieke how they organised book sprints and open education projects in Finland, the UK & Germany.

Next up for OKF Ireland, Open Data Ireland and Open Education: 

Our next event will take place on 22nd February, 2014 in Facebook and we will stage the first Irish book sprint for an easy to follow course book ‘An Introduction to Computer Science” that is looking to prepare our secondary students for the future – details available on the  Open Data Day Dublin registration page.

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated, to Flora Fleischer, Shawn Day and Denis Parfenov for making the event happen. Many thanks to Joonas Mäkinen, Marieke Guy, Denis Parfenov and Darius Whelen for sharing their valuable insights and expertise. Very special thanks to Gavin Russell in the Computer Science Department of UCC for sponsoring the venue and being invaluable in setting up technology for us!

NOW: Stay up to date and share ideas by tweeting:

Tweet #OpenEdIRL

Tweets about “#OpenEdIRL OR #okfIRL OR #opendataIRL OR from:@OKFirl”

In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses.

Ireland ranks 24th on the Open Data Index. The UK and US top the 2013 Index, which is a result of community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.

The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.

Rufus Pollock, Founder and CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation said:

Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and
innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it
brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health.
There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from
governments in the last few years, but this Index reveals that too much
valuable information is still unavailable.

Open Government Partnership countries by Open Data Index score

The UK and US are leaders on open government data but even they have room for improvement: the US for example does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, while the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data. Ireland takes a hit in the area of postcodes which affects its overall results but it’s important to note that there are other countries such as France, Austria or Moldova currently performing better.with a similar lack of postcode data.

There is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence, and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons – including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.

Less than half of the key data sets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to legally and technically use, reuse and redistribute data.

In Ireland it is the Irish PSI licence that is not considered to be open to international standards by everyone. Following the Open Data Index 2013 this is something the Open Data Ireland community is looking to address with the relevant Government Department in the near future. Particularly because fully open and freely re-usable data enables citizens and businesses to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.

Pollock:

For the true benefits of open data to be realised, governments must do more
than simply put a few spreadsheets online. The information should be easily
found and understood, and should be able to be freely used, reused and
shared by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.

CONTACT:

Open Knowledge Foundation on +44 (0)1223 422159 or index@okfn.org.
To see the full results: http://index.okfn.org.
For graphs of the data: https://index.okfn.org/visualisations.

CONTACT IRELAND:

Denis Parfenov (@prfnv), Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland Ambassador | Denis Parfenov, Open Data Index 2013 Ireland Editor

NOTES FOR EDITORS

The Open Data Index is a community-based effort initiated and coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Index is compiled using contributions from civil society members and open data practitioners around the world, which are then peer-reviewed and checked by expert open data editors. The Index provides an independent assessment of openness in the following areas: transport timetables; government budget; government spending; election results; company registers; national map; national statistics; legislation; postcodes / ZIP codes; emissions of pollutants.

Countries assessed (in rank order): United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Australia, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, Iceland, Moldova, Bulgaria, Malta, Italy, France, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Israel, Czech Republic, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Croatia, Isle Of Man, Japan, Serbia, Russian Federation, Ecuador, South Korea, Poland, Taiwan R.O.C., China, Indonesia, Hungary, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Jersey, Guernsey, Slovak Republic, Bermuda, Romania, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Singapore, Lithuania, South Africa, Cayman Islands, Egypt, Nepal, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Gibraltar, Belgium, Hong Kong, Barbados, Bahamas, India, Bahrain, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Kenya, British Virgin Is.,  Saint Kitts & Nevis, Cyprus. NB: a number of countries were not assessed, often because they were not open enough to have an active civil society able or free to safely carry out the research.

Open Data is information which can be freely used, reused and shared by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. Truly open data demands a range of both technical and legal qualities which ensure that anyone can reuse it freely, for maximum benefit, and the Open Data Index assesses all of these. The Open Definition sets out the principles which define “openness” in relation to data and content.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is an international non-profit working to open up information around the world so it can be used to empower citizens and organizations to build fair and sustainable societies.

The annual summit for the Open Government Partnership will take place in London on 31st October to 1st November. More details at: http://www.opengovpartnership.org/