Rebecca Nyman Service Designer Gordon Williamson Product Manager Open Data Discovery Rebecca Nyman Service Designer Gordon Williamson Product Manager

“Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.” Source: https://blog.okfn.org/2013/10/03/defining-open-data/ The DTA’s Open Data team look after data.gov.au and NationalMap - platforms for publishing and viewing open data.

Framing the problem

Service context What are the trends a new service could positively influence? Sharing data Government transparency Generating value from government data Evidence based decision making What are the DTA’s internal barriers? Funding and commitment Uncertainty on executive engagement The restrictions to work within? Other agency work Operate within budget Operating within public license and trust What must certainly be available for our service to succeed? Endorsement/agreement to proceed Skills internally Full MDT Cooperation with other agencies

Service promise What will happen if the service is a success? All available open data is de-identified Data is high quality and updated frequently Government policy is transparent and visibly informed by open data Data is easy to discover and re-use What are the specific user needs we want to offer an answer to? Strong technical platform Developing data skills across gov Community engagement What are our values as an organisation? User needs first Technical excellence Quality guidance

User insights

What we wanted to know What tools and processes do data publishers have? What are the ways of managing data? What are the blockers to publishing data? What are the critical needs to publish open data? Are there processes in existence for open data publishing? What are consumers doing with open data? What do consumers need from open data? What is the consumer experience with open data?

Hypotheses The hypotheses we want to test in user research are: Data is currently poor quality, therefore is not valuable or useful Data is hard to find, both within and external to agencies Data is hard to publish, both within and external to agencies Data management is usually done by a handful of experts within agencies; when they leave, their skills are lost Agencies are unclear on the benefits and risks of publishing open data Hypotheses

Target user groups Data Consumers Data Publishers Anyone that uses the data on data.gov.au, browses the website or uses the API, including private companies, gov departments and individuals. End users (unaware of data) Novice data users Expert value creators Machines (Source: Open Data Institute, 2018) Target user groups Data Publishers Anyone that publishes open data, including: Government agencies - manual and infrequent Government agencies publishing large amounts of data that is harvested by data.gov.au Private firms with public interest data

Stakeholders As a team, we identified a broad range of stakeholders with immediate, adjacent and extended relationships with open data. Immediate are stakeholders that interact directly with open data - whether that’s data.gov.au, search.data.gov.au or national map. Adjacent are those that don’t contribute, but use the data supplied by data.gov.au Extended are those unaware that they’re using open data

We spoke to 27 users from federal, state and local government, and private sector. We synthesized the findings...

The pain points (issues) We found a range of issues end to end along the service. Low agency/executive engagement Low political endorsement Poor communication across tiers of government Average data availability Data preparation is a laborious process Low level of data knowledge and training Metadata is often poor quality Lack of publishing and metadata standards Existing data set updates are infrequent Councils struggle to know where to start in delivering open data

Hypothesis results Hypothesis 1: Data is currently poor quality, therefore is not valuable or useful While there were some complaints about the data quality, there were many more comments about data quantity. Open data consumers prefer more data sets and more frequent data updates, when there is a way for them to measure and verify the quality. Hypothesis 2: Data is hard to find, both within and external to agencies Data publishers confirmed that their agencies don’t publish as much of their data as they should. We found that at a council level, this was particularly true, with many councils not publishing due to both funding and security concerns. The other issue is lack of visibility or communication between council, state and federal levels on data collection and publication. Hypothesis 3: Data is hard to publish, both within and external to agencies We found that it is in fact a laborious process for data publishers to clean and prepare data to be in the correct machine readable format. Hypothesis 4: Data management is usually done by a handful of experts within agencies, when the leave their skills are lost Data publishers confirmed that there is a lack of knowledge and skills in data publishing across agencies. Consequently, they become the point of contact for publishing data or publishing guidance and assistance. This in turn creates a bottleneck and unhappy users. Hypothesis 5: Agencies are unclear on the benefits and risks of publishing open data The majority of our users confirmed that their agencies do not prioritise data publishing, particularly at state and council level. Agencies with harvesting to data.gov.au are the exceptions to this.

Ideation

How might we... To frame the ideation for an improved service, we created a series of ‘how might we’ statements based on user pain points. The following have been selected for the upcoming workshops with users.

Data Publishers Engagement HMW increase awareness and engagement with data.gov.au? Publishers include: federal, state and council levels of government Education HMW increase open data publishing knowledge across the APS? HMW encourage agencies to share their knowledge in a coordinated way? Designing across the seams HMW unify the experience between CKAN, MAGDA and NationalMap? Data collection HMW assist councils to collect open data? HMW increase data collection across levels of government, while reducing data duplication? Preparing data HMW simplify the data preparation process for publishers? Metadata & standards HMW help publishers write user friendly metadata? HMW make using metadata standards so easy that they’re invisible? Publishing process & frequency HMW simplify the data publishing process? HMW engage publishers to publish data more frequently?

Data Consumers Finding data Engagement HMW increase awareness and engagement with data.gov.au? Consumers include: private companies, other gov agencies, individual researchers, academics (and more) Education HMW improve understanding across the APS on how to use open data? Designing across the seams HMW unify the experience between NationalMap and data.gov.au? Finding data HMW enable consumers to discover the data they need in a way that most makes sense to them? (for example, visually) Consumer feedback HMW enable consumers to get the data they need, when they need it? HMW convey consumer needs to publishers? (so consumers can get the datasets they need, and publishers can improve their service) One gov HMW enable gov agencies to find and reuse other agency data for free (or exchange)?

Up next Ideation workshops Future service design We’re running two ideation workshops, one with data publishers and the other with data consumers. The result will be a range of ideas for the future open data service. Future service design The team will use the ideas from the workshops to design the future service in the form of user journeys or storyboards. Want to find out more? Email us at data@digital.gov.au Up next