Shadbolt says 'no going back' on open data trend

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, the government advisor on transparency and open data and chair of the Local Data Panel, said the trend of the past year in which public bodies have made increasing amounts of data available for re-use is unlikely to be reversed. "Open data is where government and the political parties now see no going back," he told the Beyond 2010 conference in Birmingham. "It will make a presumption that public data that can be made public will be published," he added. The data should be made available under the new Open Government Licence and using open standards, and "will be timely and fine grained". Shadbolt said the latter would help to produce a rapid digest of the information and help to improve services. He also said that public bodies should have a duty to encourage the re-use of the data by third parties. The Local Data Panel is currently working with stakeholders on how to standardise data from local authorities, particularly that on spending, and encouraging developers to understand what it is possible to do with the data. Shadbolt predicted that the government's requirement that public authorities publish details of all their spending of more than £500, due to come into effect in January 2011, would help to improve procurement by making the organisations subject to wider scrutiny. He said similar benefits have already emerged in the trend for central government departments to publish data on their energy consumption, which has prompted them to reduce how much electricity they use. Commenting on the overall benefits, he said: "It will probably make your processes more efficient and take out costs. It's a hugely interesting opportunity to find efficiencies."