Today, the Chair of APPSI has written to Lord McNally, Minister of State for Justice, setting out the obstacles to the successful re-use of public sector information as well as suggestions for overcoming some of these obstacles.

See: 

The Prime Minister has tasked Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt with making much more Public Sector Information (PSI) easily accessible over the web. In parallel, the Shareholder Executive has been studying how best to make available information from Trading Funds in a sustainable way. Both organisations have asked the government's Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI) for suggestions on how to facilitate their work. Since the two tasks interact and success will need both short and long term actions, APPSI has produced a paper entitled Exploiting government's information assets for the public good which sets out a consolidated view by the Panel of how best to proceed.

APPSI's key points are:

• The value of PSI to citizens and businesses alike is now widely recognised. The factors which block realisation of this value are no longer technological but rather cultural, policy, institutional and financial ones. We therefore warmly welcome the Making Public Data Public initiative;
• We identify areas where information 'prospecting and harvesting' would be beneficial in the short term. But we also urge that a longer term and prioritised information garnering strategy should be put in place;
• In particular, we identify some 'Core Reference Geographies' which would underpin many activities of the state, its organisations (e.g. emergency services) and businesses and urge that these are made freely available and maintained as a key part of a national information infrastructure;
• We identify some policy changes and other actions which would considerably facilitate successful re-use of PSI;
• We note that the growing use of the new technologies has major ramifications for current government policies and practice applied to Trading Funds, notably in the practicability of some forms of end user licenses.

See Exploiting-government-information-assets-for-public-good.pdf (247.54 KB)

Today, the Chair of APPSI, David Rhind, has written to Michael Wills, Minister of State for Justice, updating him on the presentations and discussions at the APPSI meeting on 23 July 2009 which was attended by two external speakers:

• Michael Cross, journalist and founder of the Guardian Free Our Data campaign
• Andrew Stott, Director of Digital Engagement, Cabinet Office

See Letter-to-MW.pdf (38.42 KB) and AnnexA-APPSI-minutes.pdf (66.19 KB)

Michael Wills Minister of State for Justice has been sent a briefing which sets out the Panel's views on Ordnance Survey's new business strategy.

The briefing is preceded with a covering letter from David Rhind, Chair of APPSI, which updates the  Minister on various PSI developments since their meeting in early June.  The briefing itself welcomes and acknowledges the principles underpinning Ordnance Survey's new Business Strategy and their importance in facilitating resolution of one of the longest running and most distracting issues in the public sector information world. It also highlights many of the issues which need to be resolved before any Strategy can be realised and make some constructive comments on these.  This briefing was sent to the Shareholder Executive leading on the implementation of Ordnance Survey's new business strategy on 29 May 2009.

Michael Wills responded positively to APPSI’s letter by reinforcing the need to drive the PSI agenda with greater speed, and he looks forward to meeting the Chair of APPSI in autumn 2008 to discuss how to take APPSI’s recommendations forward.

Letter from Michael Wills MP to the Chair  (PDF - 135 KB)

Professor Avinash Persaud, APPSI's economics expert, has written a short note that analyses the provision and value of PSI for HM Treasury.  In this paper, Professor Persaud argues that

"to facilitate appropriate investment and development of the PSI economy, a necessary early step will be for the whole value chain of PSI across the economy, and to government revenues in particular, to be more visible."

He also recommends

"that any study of trading funds focused on the three largest and tried to draw some general conclusions across their differences, rather than tried to tackle trading funds as a generic group."

See 'A Short Note On Analysing the Provision and Value of Public Sector Information'.