Episode Details

Government portals hold thousands of datasets that get downloaded once and never opened again. The position here is that dataset count is a vanity metric and repeat use is the real measure of a portal's health, citing Data.gov's 300,000 plus datasets and their dead long tail. The answer is to treat a dataset like a product with an owner, a release schedule and documentation, and to retire the rest.

You will learn how to separate the needs of journalists, advocates and oversight bodies, why Transport for London's live feed produced CityMapper and tens of millions of pounds in value, how to read public records requests as a demand signal, and why a plain language data dictionary decides whether a dataset gets cited.

Key takeaways

• Measure repeat downloads and living audiences instead of the number of datasets published.
• Pick one audience per dataset, since journalists, advocates and auditors need opposite things.
• Retire 90 percent of datasets and fund the ten people fight over, such as spending, permits, inspections and police stops.
• Use recurring public records requests as a free backlog of what to publish well.
• Open your download logs, find the five datasets people return to, and give each a named owner and publishing schedule.

Chapters
0:00 Why open data portals become graveyards
0:44 Repeat downloads beat dataset counts
1:12 Journalists, advocates and auditors want different things
2:08 Transport for London and CityMapper
3:20 Use records requests to pick datasets
3:46 Data dictionaries and named dataset owners

Go deeper, free lessons

• Freedom of Information and open records: what becomes public and when
• Data quality scorecards for government datasets
• Mapping the public data landscape: registries, admin records, and survey data
• Governing privacy and equity on legacy systems
• Managing stakeholders and public accountability

Full article and transcript: https://www.mba-training.com/blog/open-data-publishing-public-sector-playbook

MBA Training, mba-training.com