WRITTEN ON July 6th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information

OPSI has set up a public-sector data unlocking service to support the Power of Information work. To quote OPSI:

we know that people can encounter problems from time to time getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. Difficulties can include problems with charging, licensing or the data standards that public sector information is provided in.

Not access (covered by Freedom of Information), but re-use

These problems aren’t about access (which is dealt with under Freedom of Information legislation), but all the other issues which can occur when you want to do something with public sector information – copy it, remix it with other data or add value and republish it. If you are trying to re-use some public sector information, but the data you need is locked-up, this service is for you.

How it works

1. You describe the public sector information asset you want unlocked for re-use, and post a request to the service. We’ll check through your request and if it’s OK (e.g. not a Freedom of Information request) we’ll post it here.

2. Others can see your request and support it, either by adding a comment or by voting. The more support a request has, the better the chances of unlocking the information you want to re-use.

3. We’ll contact the public sector information holder and see what can be done to unlock the information for re-use. To keep things simple, if the problem relates to an issue specifically covered by the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations or the Information Fair Trader Scheme, we’ll treat it accordingly – so you won’t need to make a separate complaint. We’ll post back our findings here.

Coupled with the showusabetterway competition and the growing list of new data sets (TransportDirect has been added since last post) it’s been perhaps the most exciting week for progress since we started IdealGov.

UPDATE: I tried the service out (on the flimsy pretext of the slightly paranoid and entirely unenforceable restrictive licence on Excellence & fairness. The process seems very familiar from the original IdealGov ethnography/Wibbi rubric in 2005!:

1. Describe the problem and any history* •

2. Describe what you would like – your ideal solution* •

3. Describe what you would do if the information was unlocked* •

It’s practically Wibbi-tastic! Hurrah!