Towards an Expanded and IntegratedOpen Government Data Agenda for India

Sumandro ChattapadhyayHasGeek Media LLPThe Sarai Programme, CSDSwww.ajantriks.net@ajantriks

The argument

/ The existing (open) government data agenda in India

/ Expanding the government data agenda (to connect with national e-governance initiatives)

/ Integrating the government data agenda (with relevant government information policies)

Introduction to an ongoing research

/ 'Opening government data by mediation: Exploring the Roles, Practices and Strategies of Data Intermediary Organisations in India'

/ A study by HasGeek Media LLP, Bangalore, as part of the 'Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in DevelopingCountries' research network managed by World Wide WebFoundation and supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada

/ Principal investigators: Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Zainab Bawa (Co-Founder, HasGeek)

/ Research schedule: May 2013 – April 2014

National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

/ Drafted by Department of Science and Technology

/ First draft version made public on May 2011

/ Gazette notification on 17th March 2012

/ A policy for internal and public sharing of (Central) government data in both human- and machine-readable forms

/ Explicit recommendation of open standards, but no mention of open licenses

/ Mandates development of <http://data.gov.in/> portal, with National Informatics Centre, Department of Electronics and IT, as nodal agency for implementation

data.gov.in

data.gov.in: History

/ Powered by Open Government Platform <ogpl.gov.in>, an open source Drupal-based data and content management system, developed by NIC in collaboration with the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, General Services Administration, Government of United State of America

/ Leverages and builds upon the best practices and features of <data.gov> and <india.gov.in>

/ First public version of the portal was launched on May 21, 2012

/ Second version of the portal, moving from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7,is about to be launched in near future

data.gov.in: Functions

/ Unified catalog of datasets published by various central government agencies, including both data stored at the data portal itself and data stored in the server of the agency

/ Users, both governmental and non-governmental, can browse the dataset catalog, view the metadata, comment on and rank various aspects of the dataset, create basic visualisations by choosing variables from the dataset, download available datasets and submit request for those that are not available yet

/ Data controllers from all government agencies can contribute, edit, update datasets, and track related activities, including comments and rankings

The present challenges

/ Slow, piecemeal, irregular and heterogeneous availability of data in the portal

/ Ensuring contribution of data to the portal is a highly labour- and time-intensive process at the moment

/ Separated policy and process frameworks for proactive and reactive disclosure of data

/ Centralised source of data availability vs. dispersed user groups

/ Availability of national-scale data vs. demand for local data

Expanding the agenda through interoperability

/ Insufficient cross-agency harmonisation of data operations

/ Lack of government-wide interoperability framework and national enterprise architecture

/ Implementation of NDSAP may create a backwards push forthe agencies to re-organise their data management practices

/ Crucial opportunity to harmonise, in both technical and semantic terms, data management processes across agencies

/ NDSAP conceptualises <data.gov.in> both as a portal for citizens to access government data, as well as for intra-governmental data sharing (often of 'sensitive' data)

Expanding the agenda through decentralisation

/ An important aspect of the OGD agenda is enabling discoverability and autonomous utilisation (commercial or non-commercial) of various fragments of government data, without it necessarily being part of a structured citizen engagement exercise

/ For this, it is important to decentralise the points of supply of open government of data

/ This is not an argument against centralised web-infrastructure for managing government data but for allowing administrative priviledges to local creators, publishers, and re-users of government data (such as municipality authority and government schools) to make use of centralised web-infrastructure to serve open government data (and data-based services) at the most local level

Integrating the agenda with information policies

/ Expansion of the proactive disclosure mandate and its integration with the agenda of reactive disclosure of public information, which is governed by the Right to Information Act

/ Memo circulated by the Department of Personnel and Training, on 15th April 2013, specifies the guidelines for implementationof suo motu disclosure of information under section 4 of the RTI Act, which emphasised the need for proactive disclosure but did not specify how it was to be operationalised

/ The guidelines make it obligatory for all government agencies to declare on the website the detailed list of all datasets managed and those that are publicly available, as well as to disclose all RTI requests received by the agency concerned andthe respective responses given out

Towards an expanded and integrated agenda

/ India is presently experiencing an emerging agenda for proactive disclosure of government data and information, well-premised upon both the older (and relatively more driven by peoples’ organisations) ‘right to information’ movement and the newer (and relatively more driven by technical and policyanalyst communities) ‘open data’ advocacy.

/ An evolving governance context that is transforming towards greater dependence on and sophistication of data-driven decision making

/ Possibility of creating an impact in not only opening up government data for creation of various data products and services, but also for advancing a greater public monitoring ofand participation in government activities.

But what about the demand side?

/ It is not very clear how data and information published by Government of India, either as open data or not, flow through and is transformed and translated by various organisational nodes to ultimately effect and inform grass-root campaigns and focused advocacies

/ Who mediates between the government who publishes dataand the citizen who uses the data?

/ The need to study existing ecologies of government data mediation and usage

/ How to locate these mediators? How to study them?

Thank you very much.

Sumandro ChattapadhyayHasGeek Media LLPThe Sarai Programme, CSDSwww.ajantriks.net@ajantriks