Via the good offices of @julianhuppert (Lib Dem MP for Cambridge), today I was able to meet Ed Davey (Minister responsible for #opendata) at Dept. of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) with an Open Rights Group-led delegation of Chris Taggart (@countculture), Harry Metcalf (@harrym) and Jim Killock (@jimkillock). We asked to meet him to put across the views of developers and SMEs on the government’s new institutions for #opendata, which seem to be putting up a paywall around the core reference data of maps, land records, addresses, company data etc, even though there are government first purchasers of the data.
NOTE: this was an on-the-record meeting with a Minister, but these are my notes and the minister’s office or ORG might have a slightly different record.
The meeting opened with some arguments from our side about the democratic importance of opendata, how we believe it could be opened further without significant costs (given that internal government trading makes up most of the spending) and the importance of #opendata releases as a way to reduce the fricion of charging around data. When the Minister spoke his view was strikingly close to the arguments in the Open Data Measures policy statement, in that he strongly defended the proposed new institutions for #opendata, the Public Data Group (PDG) and the Data Strategy Board (DSB) from our counter-arguments. He said, for example, that OS maps were excellent by international standards because it trades its data and that this trading strengthens its focus through market challenge. He said that Met Office were releasing more data than any other meteorological agency in the world under the current government’s policy, and that Companies House had reorganised because of the digital revolution and data releases. He argued that the PDG would drive efficiencies through de-duplication of back office capacity in the agencies and that DSB would release further open data by wise supervision of the £170m government budget for public sector data purchases.
Given the government’s stellar track record on releasing data so far I was really hoping for the Minister to be a little more pro #opendata, pro agency reform to achieve wider transformational change. As it was, he defended the principle of government monopoly trading of data, and argued that free data can co-exist with chargeable data despite, in our view, the damage this does to the investment climate. He also mentioned that he saw freemium models as ‘very interesting’, whereas we would like to decouple free from the ‘mium’ (which would be consultancy around the free data).
We counter-argued against these views, and I think we gained some traction with him. We pointed out that full release of data is transformational, removing the friction of monopoly government trading from the market. For example it takes Royal Mail, OFCOM and Ordnance Survey to administer and regulate trading in the national list of addresses: this is very inefficient by comparison with open release. As we represented three of the small businesses meant to be delivering the government’s vision for #opendata, we pointed out that we find it hard to get investments in the current situation where the current charging regime for core reference data represents a tax on all UK digital service transactions. Other countries are releasing their data at a rapid rate (following our example, and learning from our mistakes) and the UK’s advantage as the best place to build an #opendata business will be lost in months not years. Finally, we argued the case on affordability: most of the money spent on core reference data is spent by government itself (e.g. 83% of Met Office revenues, 58% of OS revenues), and so giving the data away free means that government departments don’t have to buy data… and the money freed up from this spending can directly fund the agencies to release the data in the first place.
On this last point it was interesting that the Minister and Shareholder Executive (present to advise) had both read my blog on affordability of #opendata. They disputed the figures I have taken from the four agencies’ Report and Accounts which I argue shows the releases can be cost free. We have agreed to further discuss the ways in which they think costs will arise once releases are done and internal trading ceases. It may be we are using different language for the same thing: we know it costs money to collect the data, but we want the government first purchaser to pay for this bill without using trading to allocate the funds… this is not extra spending. Achieving this will involve some work in government (by the DSB?) to specify each agency’s public task and to allocate costs where they necessarily arise. But there should not be any new spending in our scenario eg opening Land Registry’s registers to create new services while retaining charges for stamping land documents is perfectly possible.
The minister wanted to put the ball in our court by asking the open community to say where the new revenues to come from if data is released. He said that the numbers in Rufus Pollock’s report on the economics of open data were based on ‘heroic assumptions’. This is the real challenge to the #opendata community: are we arguing that we can make more money from data than government monopoly trading by agencies? No, not in the short term: this is digital infrastructure and has along payback period across millions of people and businesses. Our modest startups will not out-trade the Ordnance Survey any time soon. However, if we allow managements of the data agencies to frame the debate on this question, the government will never release any further data. As Chris Taggart eloquently put it… did we stop and ask how the Internet was going to pay for itself? No: we allowed researchers and businesses to innovate… and the Internet has transformed our economy and society in a decade. Open data on registers, services, performance, places etc is the next phase of digital infrastructure. Without it, we will not have the liberal home market that creates the next great digital businesses in the UK, and if we apply short-term cost-benefit arguments the government will never act to liberalise in the way we need to. If anyone doubts that profound change that is coming to digital infrastructure, look at the influence of the smartphone app stores in publishing, newspapers and transport. This is the context for the need to frame the question about benefits of open data in an entirely different way around infrastructure, a new transparent politics and new business models.
So this is a dangerous moment: allowing public sector managements holding monopoly government trading rights to define the public interest in open data will seriously undermine the fantastic progress this government has made on open data. We’ve made significant investments in Placr to try to create one of those ‘next gen’ businesses. We have been today to put our case to the Minister. Only time will tell if he seizes this opportunity to reform, deregulate and deliver the environment we need to innovate with #opendata.