Open Government Action Plan commitment 3: improving how we share information

Engagement

Some of the activities which are specified within the data commitment are quite focused on publishing Official Statistics as open data, including the ongoing support to data producers to help them publish high value statistical open datasets on statistics.gov.scot.  However, we have continued to participate in a wide range of stakeholder engagement activities to promote and help people access open data in a number of sectors.

Events

We have promoted Scotland’s Official Statistics open data publishing platform, statistics.gov.scot, at various events across Scotland, such as the Gathering 2019, which is organised by Scottish Council Voluntary Organisations.  At the Gathering, we ran a stall and this allowed us to demonstrate to representatives from voluntary organisations on how statistics.gov.scot can be used to help people find out more about their local area.  We have also given demonstrations on statistics.gov.scot at public events such as DataFest at a number of locations across Scotland. 

We hosted a round table meeting on Open Data and Data Literacy in April 2019.  As part of this meeting, we have sought the views of civil society and a wide range of other organisations to discuss what should we do to assess next steps for open data and data literacy.  Some of the groups we have linked with include Scottish Community Alliance, the Corra Foundation and Open Knowledge International.   We have met with community groups and local authority representatives to discuss the opportunities of using, accessing and understanding data for empowering communities at a local level for decision making

We have also participated in the Scottish Open Data Unconference in 2020, organised by Code the City, a civic hacking initiative interested in hack weekends, open data, workshops, and idea generation tools.

We led a couple of sessions on finding open data and on use cases of open data.  This is helping us to make further links in the sector, with organisations such as the Open Data Services Cooperative. 

At these events, the types of thingswe looked to gain insights on include:

• What are the priority use cases that people want from open data?
• What are the existing use cases of open data where open data has provided value or additional value?
• What would make it easier for data producers to open up their data?
• What are gaps in evidence in open data?
• Existing research and examples of good practice in opening up data from other administrations
• Who else could be constructive partners to help achieve our goals?

Training

We have delivered training to councils on how to use our open data platform and we are considering the technical skills of local authority representatives in building profiles from open data .  We have also presented and promoted the importance of open data at national seminars such as the Power of Data conference and Wallscope Open Data Mixer.

Collaboration

We have had collaborated with the Scottish Tech Army (STA) to review processes around Open Data publishing, in relation to the COVID-19 emergency.  STA volunteers took on a challenge to build a dashboard reusing a number of different published sources of open data including those published from Scottish Government, Public Health Scotland and National Records of Scotland. The website plays musical notes to create sonic graphs of Covid-19 cases that allow the visually impaired to keep track of infection rates and fatalities, using the latest official data for health boards and local councils. This is a great example of where people have built products by reusing open data to create something innovative which has real value.

As part of the project, STA volunteers provided welcome constructive technical and practical feedback to the Open Data team within Digital Directorate on their experiences of using and reusing open datasets on the COVID-19 pandemic when building this dashboard.  This will assist the open data team in our steps to consider how to maximise the value of publishing open datasets in as efficient and sustainable manner as possible, both in the short term around the COVID-19 pandemic, and for longer term consideration of our processes going forward.