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.