Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information

A double-page coverage of the PSI Conference held on 14 October 2008 can be found in Whitehall and Westminster World today, (see pp. 4-5). 

In the article headlined 'Information Age' Carol Tullo explains how PSI could stimulate the development and growth of Europe's information industry if we free up access and remove the barriers to re-use.

The article headlined 'Calls for a duty to share info' provides highlights of the panel discussion chaired by Richard Susskind, and including David Rhind, Chair of APPSI, William Perrin, Deputy Director of Transformational Government at the Cabinet Office, and Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Computer Science at Southampton University. 

The article headlined 'Minister trials data lab', covers the speech by Tom Watson, Minister for Transformational Government at the Cabinet Office, where he talked about the creation of a new facility to make best use of new data-management techniques, and referred to the some of the most innovative uses of public information.

This was chaired superbly by Richard Susskind: as a result, it ran to time and he teased out active contributions from the 80 or so people present. The speakers were also excellent and provocative. Carol Tullo, Head of the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) gave a wide-ranging and comprehensive introduction to PSI re-use and OPSI’s role. Thereafter, Jim Wretham (OSPI), Marcia Jackson (OPSI) and Ian Gibbs (Newham Council) led three policy workshops on different aspects of PSI and reported back the extensive debates to the plenary session.  The morning was concluded by Dr David Pullinger (Digital Policy Director at the COI) – who stood in for Michael Wills - speaking on ‘Service transformation and the re-use of PSI’.  In effect he described very clearly the creation of a national information infrastructure built on Web 2.0 concepts.

After lunch, Tom Watson, the newly promoted Cabinet Office Minister for Transformational Government, gave a bravura performance on what had to change. 

Thereafter, a panel of three answered questions from the audience, prompted and fired up by Richard Susskind. William Perrin (Deputy Director of Strategy and Policy, Transformational Government, Cabinet Office) argued forcefully that radical change towards a personalisation of services was both necessary for achieving government’s aims on transformational government and was readily possible.  Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Southampton University, articulated the benefits of contemporary web technology and likely developments plus their relevance to our objectives. David Rhind, Chair of APPSI spoke briefly about the contents of the APPSI letter to Michael Wills, the example of how government statistics (notably but not solely the £500m Population Census) were distributed free to all, and the issue of public trust in information where judgement was very much involved in interpretation of such information based on sampling or professional judgement, the results from which were highly politically sensitive. Important contributions from the floor were made by Chris Corbin and Shane O’Neil, amongst others.

Richard Allen (Chair of the Power of Information Task Force) followed with his own bravura performance, covering much of the ground he did when speaking to APPSI about the work of the Power of Information Taskforce. His leitmotif was ‘cumulative innovation in a knowledge economy’ and he spoke on four topics: information discovery, legal factors, commercial exploitation and challenges for the future. Some 450 entries had been received for the ‘Show Us a Better Way’ competition, two-thirds of which involved use of geospatial/geographic information or data.

The final session was a novel one with 10 minute lightening talks by each of four contributors. The first was by Javier Hernandez-Ros, the Head of the Digital Libraries and Public Sector Information Unit in the EC DG for Information Society and Media.  He started from the viewpoint that PSI was owned not by a state bureaucracy but by the populace/taxpayer. He pointed out, in response to the comment that we were all awaiting the outcome of the EC review of the Re-Use Directive, that at least one country in the EU had made re-use mandatory and so could the UK.  Christine Gifford, member of APPSI gave a barnstorming performance about the lack of present engagement in PSI from the Health Service, Gavin Starks described a commercial project  with the modest aim of creating ‘ a neutral aggregation platform to measure and track all the energy data on Earth’ which had been put together by four people working part-time and yet which already had a million footprints. Finally Brian Collins, the Chief Scientific Advisor at DfT, described the National Transport Information Incubator. This is a public/private consortium to foster innovation in bringing information in useful form to travellers. From idea to availability as a service is mandated to be less than three weeks. He stressed the importance of technology to constrain re-purposing of information wherever appropriate and the use of open standards; the final report is on the DfT website.

Conclusions: The contributions were first class, the issues addressed were important ones and there was much enthusiasm that the ‘forces of darkness’ would be overcome!  The audience left cheered and confident that the world could be made a better place through the power of information.

The conference will be profiled in a forthcoming edition of Whitehall and Westminster World.

Today, we say goodbye to four APPSI members: Michael Allen, Christopher Roper, Avinash Persaud, John Thornton.

The biographies of these members highlight the wealth of expertise they brought to the Panel:

Michael Allen, APPSI member from January 2004-October 2008

Michael Allen is Head of Knowledge Management at the Driver and Vehicle Operator Group at the Department of Transport, which includes the four main agencies of DVLA Swansea, Driving Standards Agency, Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, and the Vehicle Certification Agency. Knowledge Management is part of the Modernisation Programme for DVO Group.  Michael is also a lecturer with the Open University Business School MBA Programme, working with managers in South Wales and Russia in two courses, Strategy, and Knowledge Management. He was County Librarian with the City and County of Swansea from 1995 to 2002, working extensively on lifelong learning issues. He was a member of an EC Socrates team researching the impact of library services on community learning programmes, and is currently a member of the Library and Information Services Council (Wales)

Avinash D. Persaud, APPSI member from September 2005-October 2008

Avinash D. Persaud is Chairman, Intelligence Capital Limited, a financial advisory boutique for institutions and governments. He is also Co-Chair, OECD Emerging Markets Network; Deputy Chair, Overseas Development Institute; Member of Council of the London School of Economics; Member of Council of the Royal Economics Society; Director, Global Association of Risk Professionals; Member of the Finance Committee, Coram Family; Trustee, Errol and Nita Barrow Educational Trust; Emeritus Professor of Gresham College; and Visiting Fellow, CFAP, University of Cambridge. Persaud was formerly Investment Director, GAM London Ltd, managing director State Street, global head of currency and commodity research at J. P. Morgan and director, fixed-income research, UBS. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the IMF and ECB and a Distinguished Visitor to the Republic of Singapore.  Persaud has published widely in the fields of risk, liquidity, international capital flows, regulation and ethics. He developed the EMU Calculator, Risk Appetite Index and Liquidity Black Holes theory. In 2000, he won the Jacques de Larosiere Award in Global Finance from the Institute of International Finance in Washington.

Christopher Roper, APPSI member from April 2003-October 2008

Christopher Roper has spent most of his working life as a specialised publisher of newsletters, computer software and, most recently, map-based information services to a wide range of professional groups. He currently divides his time between writing and consulting. He is a non-executive director of a number of information service companies. He is a graduate of Cambridge University with an MSc from Columbia University. In 1995, he founded Landmark Information Group, which is a major value added reseller of Public Sector Information, specialising in environmental information services. He has served on the Board of the National Geospatial Data Framework and the Council of the Association for Geographical Information. He has written widely on technical and policy issues associated with the re-use of Public Sector Information.

John Thornton, APPSI member from September 2004-October 2008

John Thornton has extensive experience in both the public and private sectors as a customer, developer, user and maintainer of public sector information He is an independent adviser on e-government, innovation and business transformation. He is a Director of e-ssential Resources Limited, which provides advice, consultancy and support to public sector bodies, and is a Director of the SMART Governance Network, a primarily local government based network for stimulating and sharing ideas on new ways of working through the improved use of technology  Between 2001 and 2005, John was the Director of e-Government for the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA). His role within the IDeA was to provide leadership and assistance to local authorities with implementing e-government and delivering services on-line. This role covered all English local authorities. It also included taking forward projects of national importance and sharing of information on a national basis. He was the lead official and spokesperson for the Local Government Association (LGA) on e-Government matters and was a member of the LGA's e-Government Task Group.  Between 1992 and 2001, John was the Managing Director of the Institute of Public Finance (IPF).

The Minister of State for Justice, Michael Wills MP has announced the reappointment of seven APPSI members:

• Mike Batty, expert member in geospatial information
• Stefan Carlyle, representative member of information producers
• Keith Dugmore, expert member in statistical information
• Christine Gifford, representative member of the onformation management community
• Hector MacQueen, representative member of Scotland
• John Ponting, expert member in geographic information services
• Peter Wienand, Deputy Chair of APPSI and expert member in intellectual property issues.

For biographical details of these APPSI members please go the the 'Members' section of this website.

David Rhind, Chair of APPSI has provided the following feedback on this seminar, for which he was Chair:

The 10th annual seminar of this group - whose members are drawn from top retailers and limited to 18 in total - was highly stimulating and well-organised by Keith Dugmore.  Some 80 people from the business communities, local and central government and academia attended.

The presentations were superb. They spanned the challenges of data sharing across the myriad institutions within central government (Pullinger), the extraordinary success of dunnhumby and Tesco in interpreting customer data and ‘mashing’ it with public sector information (Pavey), how to extract real insights rather than simple statistical descriptions from data (Robbins) and how to take forward the Treasury Select Committee’s recommendations to move largely to replacing the Census with the use of multiple administrative data sets (Martin).

Subsequent workshop sessions on comparing Census 2011 results with those from other data, on the need for a national address register (arguably made available in the public domain) and how to extract Insight from a forest of information were all lively and well-attended.  Finally a panel of experts (Richard Alldritt (UK Statistics Authority), Martin Bellingham (The Children’s Mutual & DUG), Jil Matheson (ONS), and Keith Dugmore (DUG)) opined on the big issues that needed to be addressed to extract both greater Value for Money from existing Public Sector Information and how to enhance trust in the quality and integrity of such information. This was one of those seminars where virtually everyone took an active part and was conducted in good humour but not uncritically.

DUG Seminar programme