Impact of open data on FOI enquiries

sally_kerr · February 29, 2016, 10:50am

I am currently preparing a business case to further progress Edinburgh Council’s open data strategy.
One of the areas I am investigating is the impact of open data on FOI enquiries. I am not aware that there is any real documented evidence about this, but would be delighted to hear any case studies or evidence that you are aware of?

g_jones · March 1, 2016, 3:57pm

hi sally

not evidence based policy but one of the assumptions acknowledged by the isle of man cabinet office minister to progress some agile open data projects was that it would decrease some types of FOI requests but that the shift to a proactive open government mindset was the real value anyway

graeme jones

sally_kerr · March 2, 2016, 4:51pm

Hi

Thanks for your reply, I may share back my findings

Regards

Sally Kerr

Sally Kerr
Digital Innovation Manager
01315294899 | sally.kerr@edinburgh.gov.uk mailto:Louise.Harkins@edinburgh.gov.uk

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ewan_klein · March 6, 2016, 6:29pm

I wonder whether there was any follow up on this suggestion by @Starl3n:

sally_kerr · March 7, 2016, 9:34am

Hi

I know Channel Shift are working in this area as they have to demonstrate the savings they will deliver. What are your thoughts?

On FOI, so far I have found very very little real evidence. I’ve discussed it with our FOI manager and we are going to try and run a pilot for 6 months to see if that will evidence it ourselves. However, I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg. There could be much more value in identifying re-use of data in other ways – but it is more on the ‘soft’ side than hard financial evidence. There’s probably an interesting research project in there somewhere

I have just heard from a contact at the Crichton Institute about how they have been working with 3rd year computing science students from Glasgow Uni to provide work on visualisations, research etc. I feel we should consider whether this could happen with yourselves and CEC as we are going to be releasing a lot more data (at least 260 data sets by September). I have just drawn up an action plan for this work. It’s very much on what the Council will do to deliver this, but I would also like to:

· Discuss whether we could do, working with the data from September (that would provide time to generate interesting challenges and ideas)

· ELL – what will be next year’s area of interest with students?

· Interest other areas of UoE – e.g. business school, in delivering value with our data.

I think this could be scoped under ELL?