Over the past year there has been a global shift in data policies within governments world-wide – opening up data, that once cost or was hidden from public view. Some government organisations have gone so far as to put together incentives to encourage people to make use of this newly freed data. Australian examples include state initiatives such as Victoria’s AppMyState and New South Wales’ apps4NSW and the Federal Governments Government 2.0 taskforce’s Mashup Australia. What’s important to realise though is that these promotions should be seen more as a means to an end, rather than an end in and of themselves.

Data collectors and maintainers need to exhibit a relatively low level of bias and high levels of independence. If any data collected is called into question, the validity of the entire archive, and future collections, can also be questioned. The reason for this stems for the logical (albeit poorly grounded) assumption that if one collection had been tampered with then there are grounds to suggest that all other collections may suffer the same bias.

It is for this reason that the data exposed from these sources may be little more than the aggregated and weighted data, with explanatory metadata and appropriate notes on the methodology of the study. No exposition into the links between data, or overtly controversial or political hypotheses attempting to explain the data. Anything more may suggest bias or influence: for example, a statistical agency may present statistics regarding life expectancy in collection regions, and in another study my present statistics around polluting industry in the same regions, but would be amiss to begin to draw correlations between them. The same agency may hold for data around economic indicators, but would never try to correlate them to political policy.

So while the agency may hold this data and the expertise in explaining the data, they would be reluctant to go further than collection and dissemination. However, the public is unencumbered by such ideals.

Contests such as those listed above give public agency the opportunity to drive public use of public data. This again drive straight to the goals of data agencies: public use of data reenforces their relevance. This gives the public the opportunity to ask potentially controversial questions, backed by official data, while giving the data agencies recognition for their continued importance in society.