Scotland’s Open Government action plan 2021 to 2025: milestones

Data and digital commitment

Initial milestones

This will be an iterative process.  As such, we have set out our plans for the first year, covering 2022. 

In 2022, we intend to achieve the following activities, listed under the enabling themes: 

Discovery 

• make initial steps with CivTech challenge on finding data. We plan to engage with civil society around findability of data as part of this challenge
• pilot Data Maturity Pathways project which will  guide six public sector organisations through an end to end journey which:
  • defines their objectives for data in line with their business strategy and priorities
  • builds better understanding of the components required for maturity pathways for the DTF

User needs

• user research to inform user journeys on www.statistics.gov.scot - and agree next steps on improvements for www.statistics.gov.scot  
• agree and establish communications channels and understand user needs. This includes setting up the Data Standards and Open Data Community of Practice
• make initial steps on CivTech challenge on what data people are looking for through the finding public sector data challenge

Identify and share use cases

• identify thematic areas – such climate change and public transport and financial transparency
• we plan to take an initial focus on greenhouse gas emissions datasets and commit to make more of these data and modelling available in an open and reusable format. We will review regularly with Civil Society progress and scope

Longer term activities (4 year plan, to December 2025)

As this will be an iterative process, we have only been specific for Year one of the plan. We would instead wish to review and develop further after year 1 of the plan, when we have a better sense of progress and the direction of travel. 

Activities we will definitely be participating in in Year 2 and beyond include: 

• development of AI algorithmic register
• further development of Data Transformation Framework
• further development of positive collaborations with others such as CoSLA (Local authority data taskforce) and the Data and Intelligence Network to build the culture of open and transparent use of data

The data commitment supports government openness, transparency and empowerment through open data. The actions align to three overall themes, as recommended by our open government independent reporter: data availability, building internal capacity and understanding external user needs.

Updated milestones 2023

We reviewed our 2022 progress to inform broad ideas for our direction in 2023. We collaborated with our open government civil society lead to refocus these themes from an external perspective. Together, we revised the milestones to shape tangible activities with an improved line of sight to the benefits for society and to making outputs incrementally and openly available. We have built the 2023 milestones iteratively, informed by our previous learning and consequently, not all are linear progressions from the previous work. The data activities link to user needs driven by external requirements covering a wide range of sectors including the third sector, local and central government and the private sector, as well as academia and innovation.

Creating the 2023 milestones has been a valuable process where working openly with constructive challenge has strengthened and focused the data commitment’s work.

Action: Open up data relevant to other open government themes, such as key climate change datasets used by government for modelling and reporting, data on public transport and public sector expenditure

Theme

Internal capacity

2023 milestones

The Scottish Government Data Division will work with the Fiscal Transparency Programme to share best practice and incorporate content on data standards, FAIR and open data principles, specifically within the Data Review Document developed in the alpha phase of the of the Fiscal Transparency Programme and the programme’s Data Strategy.

Support climate change policy and analytical colleagues to identify the specific data that can be published openly considering existing data and use cases for opening climate data.

Maintain contact with leads developing the Data Strategy for Health and Social Care to ensure guiding principles for relevant data standards are built into implementation plans from early on.

Promote lessons learned from Pilot Public Engagement Panel with other OG commitments

Action: Run a CivTech challenge to evaluate if technology can make public sector data easy to find, assess outcomes and set out the way forward

Theme

Data availability

2023 milestone

Publicly launch the Beta version of the Dtechtive data discoverability search engine in March 2023 and introduce Scottish Government branding later in the year. With the CivTech advisory group, consisting of public, private and third sectors, create a technical roadmap for developing the open data sources register to assist discovery and publish clear documentation supporting its use.

Action: Set up the Data Transformation Framework stating what ‘good data’ looks like and the process by which organisations can improve – this focuses on opportunity for organisations to improve data maturity, data literacy and adoption of standards, through collaboration and engagement with local government and other public sector bodies, to be useful for civil society

Theme

Internal capacity

2023 milestones

With the public sector develop and trial a modular data maturity package to offer a self-supporting approach to data maturity and developing Action Plans

With public sector organisations develop data maturity pathway products for Data Governance and Data Strategy

Provide principles/strategic guidance on use of the 4 foundations to data improvement - Leadership, governance, strategy and discoverability aligning to the pathway products

Develop a new data transformation wiki site to gather and publish supporting materials in an open, participative and collaborative way

Action: Review the front end of our official statistics open data publishing platform statistics.gov.scot

Theme

External user needs

2023 milestone

Improve the language used on statistics.gov.scot to increase user engagement and accessibility for users of the site

Action: Increase the amount of Scottish public sector open data being published, through collaborations such as the Data Standards and Open Data Community of Practice

Theme

Internal capacity and external user needs

2023 milestones

Run a series of public workshops to include different sectors to test out thinking on areas including overcoming barriers, demonstrating value and communicating open data guidance.

Start to develop refreshed technical guidance to help organisations understand and realise the benefits of open data and the practical steps to help them on their journey to open up their data informed by public workshop views

Use the public sector Community of Practice on Data Standards and Open Data, which is comprised of central and local government and other public bodies to test out thinking for the refreshed technical guidance.

Action: Develop a public register of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms

Theme

External user needs

2023 milestones

In February 2023 launch the Scottish AI Register to share with the public examples of AI in use or development across the public sector.

Provide public facing information regarding the AI being used, the data sets which support it and clear user-friendly descriptions of the process and outcomes. We will also share details of the organisations that have access to the data, and the retention and disposal details.

Initially share two AI use cases, one from SCRA considering children at risk, and one from the NHS/SG which aims to make access to public services easier for people with disabilities. We will work with colleagues across the public sector to identify and record any potential future use of AI in their on-going work.