UK Open Government and Transparency

Francis Maude is UK Minister for the Cabinet Office.  He spoke about the UK experience in January 2012 for the World Bank.

Governments are finding transparency risky, difficult and uncomfortable. But transparency sticks – it’s irreversible once you start. And I believe transparency will become the defining characteristic of future public policy.

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putting out raw data in the public domain for entrepreneurs and businesses to work with. Creating an information marketplace. And this is where I believe the UK is leading the way today.

Data sharing is underpinning everything we do to improve public services and to drive new waves of growth.

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Companies large and small are also using the data to create innovative, products and applications.

Already we’re aware of 47 independent app developers working in the UK giving information to rail passengers through their smartphones – in a market that has for the most part open up in only a few major cities.

London commuters can now use their phone apps to decide whether to rush for the train or get a cup of coffee thanks to greater transport data.

Francis Maude's speech to the World Bank – Transparency and Open Data

You can also watch the webcast recording (Windows Media format).

In addition to the UK open data site data.gov.uk there are two other initiatives of note: gov.uk from the Government Digital Service and G-Cloud.

gov.uk is a project to have a single homepage to access UK government services.  They have been using an agile methodology, and the gov.uk site is now in beta, following an alpha.   From a homepage that is a blog to an official Twitter feed at @govuk that retweets team members, it is a great example of innovation at the heart of government.

G-Cloud includes government use of the cloud as well as data centre consolidation.  They just launched the CloudStore, a list of approved services.  It includes the notion of trying to open up government procurement to a wider variety of players.  They announced CloudStore Open for Business on February 19, 2012 in their blog.  The CloudStore, which runs on MS Azure, will be available as open source.  You can follow them at @G_Cloud_UK

RT @cantwaitogo The full UK Gov #cloudstore will be released as #opensource. < great, thx #oss #govit #gov20

— Andrew Stott (@DirDigEng) February 19, 2012