In de (goede en nuttige!) sessie van de VNG over de WOO op Overheid360 eerder deze maand, werden de aanwezigen meerdere vragen gesteld. De laatste, wanneer je denkt dat de implementatie van de WOO afgerond zal zijn, leverde bovenstaande foto op.

Ik kan er nog steeds niet helemaal over uit. Het probleem van de WOO is overduidelijk dat het daarin genoemde ‘op orde krijgen van de informatiehuishouding’ tot meer werk leidt dan een overheidsorganisatie zegt aan te kunnen en budget voor te hebben (of bereid is prioriteit aan te geven).

Iedereen in de zaal zei, volgens deze foto, niet aan de wet te gaan of kunnen voldoen. Niemand zei over 5 jaren de boel op orde te hebben, de termijn die in de wet genoemd is. Twee van de 34 (6%) dachten het over 8 jaar voor elkaar te hebben, en die werden als enorme optimisten betiteld. De anderen dachten dat het tot 2030 (56%) zou duren, of nooit afkomt (38%).

De WOO krijgt het verwijt extra werk te veroorzaken. Je informatiehuishouding op orde hebben, wie eist dat nou, zo lijkt de gedachte. De WOO in huidige vorm is echter al een compromis. De eerste versie werd als onhaalbaar afgedaan, en in de nieuwe versie geeft de wetgever overheidsinstellingen vijf jaar de tijd, en de verplichting te laten zien dat je ook je best doet om in die vijf jaar een inhaalslag te maken. De 2e WOO is al een herkansing. En niet eens een tweede kans, maar de derde.

Veertig jaar geleden, 1980, werd de WOB van kracht, die openbaarheid regelt. Sinds die tijd is er vrijwel niets gedaan om openbaarheid als grondbeginsel in de informatiehuishouding op te nemen. Nog altijd wordt een WOB verzoek als lastig ervaren, want dan moet je zo zoeken waar je je spullen hebt. Omdat je je informatiehuishouding nooit hebt aangepast om openbaarheidsverzoeken snel te kunnen afhandelen. In Noorwegen krijg je per kerende post je gevraagde informatie, maar hier is een WOB verzoek (en elk verzoek om documenten, in welke vorm dan ook, is een WOB verzoek, ook dat besef is er na 40 jaren nog altijd niet) altijd extra werk, naast je gewone taken. Alsof openbaarmaking niet een wettelijke taak is. Dat heeft altijd al tot gekrakeel geleid, en de wetgever heeft de overheidsinstellingen voor die krampscheuten uitsluitend beloond (zoals het verwijderen van dwangmiddelen, anders dan de rechtsgang).

Nu verplichte actieve openbaarmaking dichterbij komt wordt nog veel zichtbaarder dat de informatiehuishouding daar niet op ingericht is. Dat was deze namelijk voor de passieve openbaarmaking van de WOB al niet. Enige tijd geleden kwam ik nog een hoofd bedrijfsinformatie bij een overheidsinstelling tegen die me vroeg “dus jij zegt dat openbaarheid wettelijk is omschreven?”. Ja dat zei ik. En wel al veel langer dan iedereen in die sessie waar ik bovenstaande foto maakte bij de overheid werkt.

Er zijn diverse zaken die al lang verplicht zijn om actief openbaar te maken (denk aan besluiten, vergunningen etc.), en dat lukt. Er is dus niet echt reden aan te nemen dat het voor een lijst van anderen zaken, zoals de WOO opnoemt, in vijf jaren niet ook zou kunnen.

Uit de slide bovenaan blijkt dat men al heeft opgegeven voordat de WOO er nog maar is.
Het is kennelijk een erg radicaal idee om een algemene openbaarheids- en data/informatie-strategie op te stellen die ook belooft de implementatie van de WOO netjes op tijd af te ronden. Een aanpak waarbij je actieve openbaarmaking als kans ziet. Als een instrument waarmee je het gedrag van allerlei externe betrokkenen kunt beïnvloeden. Zoals je nu financiering (subsidies) en regelgeving inzet om gedrag te beïnvloeden, is openbaarmaking een derde beleidsinstrument. En wel de goedkoopste van de drie.

Mij doet het allemaal denken aan het onderstaande plaatje dat in al mijn vroegere kennismanagement- en veranderprojecten wel van toepassing was. “We hebben geen tijd voor fundamentele aanpassingen, want we zijn al zo druk met ons normale werk en brandjes blussen”.


Alan O’Rourke, license CC-BY

Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

  • Peter Rukavina pointed me to this excellent posting on voting, in the context of violence as a state monopoly and how that vote contributes to violence. It’s this type of long form blogging that I often find so valuable as it shows you the detailed reasoning of the author. Where on FB or Twitter would you find such argumentation, and how would it ever surface in a algorithmic timeline? Added Edward Hasbrouck to my feedreader : The Practical Nomad blog: To vote, or not to vote?
  • This quote is very interesting. Earlier in the conversation Stephen Downes mentions “networks are grown, not constructed”. (true for communities too). Tanya Dorey adds how from a perspective of indigenous or other marginalised groups ‘facts’ my be different, and that arriving a truth therefore is a process: “For me, “truth growing” needs to involve systems, opportunities, communities, networks, etc. that cause critical engagement with ideas, beliefs and ways of thinking that are foreign, perhaps even contrary to our own. And not just on the content level, but embedded within the fabric of the system et al itself.“: A conversation during EL30.mooc.ca on truth, data, networks and graphs.
  • This article has a ‘but’ title, but actually is a ‘yes, and’. Saying ethics isn’t enough because we also need “A society-wide debate on values and on how we want to live in the digital age” is saying the same thing. The real money quote though is “political parties should be able to review technology through the lens of their specific world-views and formulate political positions accordingly. A party that has no position on how their values relate to digital technology or the environment cannot be expected to develop any useful agenda for the challenges we are facing in the 21st century.” : Gartner calls Digital Ethics a strategic trend for 2019 – but ethics are not enough
  • A Dutch essay on post-truth. Says it’s not the end of truth that’s at issue but rather that everyone claims it for themselves. Pits Foucault’s parrhesia, speaking truth to power against the populists : Waarheidsspreken in tijden van ‘post-truth’: Foucault, ‘parrèsia’ en populisme
  • When talking about networked agency and specifically resilience, increasingly addressing infrastructure dependencies gets important. When you run decentralised tools so that your instance is still useful when others are down, then all of a sudden your ISP and energy supplier are a potential risk too: disaster.radio | a disaster-resilient communications network powered by the sun
  • On the amplification of hate speech. It’s not about the speech to me, but about the amplification and the societal acceptability that signals, and illusion of being mainstream it creates: Opinion | I Thought the Web Would Stop Hate, Not Spread It
  • One of the essential elements of the EU GDPR is that it applies to anyone having data about EU citizens. As such it can set a de facto standard globally. As with environmental standards market players will tend to use one standard, not multiple for their products, and so the most stringent one is top of the list. It’s an element in how data is of geopolitical importance these days. This link is an example how GDPR is being adopted in South-Africa : Four essential pillars of GDPR compliance
  • A great story how open source tools played a key role in dealing with the Sierra Leone Ebola crisis a few years ago: How Open Source Software Helped End Ebola – iDT Labs – Medium
  • This seems like a platform of groups working towards their own networked agency, solving issues for their own context and then pushing them into the network: GIG – we are what we create together
  • An article on the limits on current AI, and the elusiveness of meaning: Opinion | Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning

This is the presentation I gave at the Open Belgium 2018 Conference in Louvain-la-Neuve this week, titled ‘The role and value of data inventories, a key step towards mature data governance’. The slides are embedded further below, and as PDF download at grnl.eu/in. It’s a long read (some 3000 words), so I’ll start with a summary.

Summary, TL;DR

The quality of information households in local governments is often lacking.
Things like security, openness and privacy are safeguarded by putting separate fences for each around the organisation, but those safeguards lack having detailed insight into data structures and effective corresponding processes. As archiving, security, openness and privacy in a digitised environment are basically inseparable, doing ‘everything by design’ is the only option. The only effective way is doing everything at the level of the data itself. Fences are inefficient, ineffective, and the GDPR due to its obligations will show how the privacy fence fails, forcing organisations to act. Only doing data governance for privacy is senseless, doing it also for openness, security and archiving at the same time is logical. Having good detailed inventories of your data holdings is a useful instrument to start asking the hard questions, and have meaningful conversations. It additionally allows local government to deploy open or shared data as policy instrument, and releasing the inventory itself will help articulate civic demand for data. We’ve done a range of these inventories with local government.

Data Inventories for Local Data Governance by Ton Zijlstra

1: High time for mature data governance in local and regional government

Hight time! (clock in Louvain-la-Neuve)Digitisation changes how we look at things like openness, privacy, security and archiving, as it creates new affordances now that the content and its medium have become decoupled. It creates new forms of usage, and new needs to manage those. As a result of that e.g. archivists find they now need to be involved at the very start of digital information processes, whereas earlier their work would basically start when the boxes of papers were delivered to them.

The reality is that local and regional governments have barely begun to fully embrace and leverage the affordances that digitisation provides them with. It shows in how most of them deal with information security, openness and privacy: by building three fences.

Security is mostly interpreted as keeping other people out, so a fence is put between the organisation and the outside world. Inside it nothing much is changed. Similarly a second fence is put in place for determining openness. What is open can reach the outside world, and the fence is there to do the filtering. Finally privacy is also dealt with by a fence, either around the entire organisation or a specific system, keeping unwanted eyes out. All fences are a barrier between outside and in, and within the organisation usually no further measures are taken. All three fences exist separately from each other, as stand alone fixes for their singular purpose.

The first fence: security
In the Netherlands for local governments a ‘baseline information security’ standard applies, and it determines what information should be regarded as business critical. Something is business critical if its downtime will stop public service delivery, or of its lack of quality has immediate negative consequences for decision making (e.g. decisions on benefits impacting citizens). Uptime and downtime are mostly about IT infrastructure, dependencies and service level agreements, and those fit the fence tactic quite well. Quality in the context of security is about ensuring data is tamper free, doing audits, input checks, and knowing sources. That requires a data-centric approach, and it doesn’t fit the fence-around-the-organisation tactic.


The second fence: openness
Openness of local government information is mostly at request, or at best as a process separate from regular operational routines. Yet the stated end game is that everything should be actively open by design, meaning everything that can be made public will be published the moment it is publishable. We also see that open data is becoming infrastructure in some domains. The implementation of the digitisation of the law on public spaces, requires all involved stakeholders to have the same (access to) information. Many public sector bodies, both local ones and central ones like the cadastral office, have concluded that doing that through open data is the most viable way. For both the desired end game and using open data as infrastructure the fence tactic is however very inefficient.
At the same time the data sovereignty of local governments is under threat. They increasingly collaborate in networks or outsource part of their processes. In most contracts there is no attention paid to data, other than in generic terms in the general procurement conditions. We’ve come across a variety of examples where this results 1) in governments not being able to provide data to citizens, even though by law they should be able to 2) governments not being able to access their own data, only resulting graphs and reports, or 3) the slowest partner in a network determining the speed of disclosure. In short, the fence tactic is also ineffective. A more data-centric approach is needed.

The third fence: personal data protection
Mostly privacy is being dealt with by identifying privacy sensitive material (but not what, where and when), and locking it down by putting up the third fence. The new EU privacy regulations GDPR, which will be enforced from May this year, is seen as a source of uncertainty by local governments. It is also responded to in the accustomed way: reinforcing the fence, by making a ‘better’ list of what personal data is used within the organisation but still not paying much attention to processes, nor the shape and form of the personal data.
However in the case of the GDPR, if it indeed will be really enforced, this will not be enough.

GDPR an opportunity for ‘everything by design’
The GDPR confers rights to the people described by data, like the right to review, to portability, and to be forgotten. It also demands compliance is done ‘by design’, and ‘state of the art’. This can only be done by design if you are able to turn the rights of the GDPR into queries on your data, and have (automated) processes in place to deal with requests. It cannot be done with a ‘better’ fence. In the case of the GDPR, the first data related law that takes the affordances of digitisation as a given, the fence tactic is set to fail spectacularly. This makes the GDPR a great opportunity to move to a data focus not just for privacy by design, but to do openness, archiving and information security (in terms of quality) by design at the same time, as they are converging aspects of the same thing and can no longer be meaningfully separated. Detailed knowledge about your data structures then is needed.

Local governments inadvertently admit fence-tactic is failing
Governments already clearly yet indirectly admit that the fences don’t really work as tactic.
Local governments have been loudly complaining for years about the feared costs of compliance, concerning both openness and privacy. Drilling down into those complaints reveals that the feared costs concern the time and effort involved in e.g. dealing with requests. Because there’s only a fence, and usually no processes or detailed knowledge of the data they hold, every request becomes an expedition for answers. If local governments had detailed insight in the data structures, data content, and systems in use, the cost of compliance would be zero or at least indistinguishable from the rest of operations. Dealing with a request would be nothing more than running a query against their systems.

Complaints about compliance costs are essentially an admission that governments do not have their house in order when it comes to data.
The interviews I did with various stakeholders as part of the evaluation of the PSI Directive confirm this: the biggest obstacle stakeholders perceive to being more open and to realising impact with open data is the low quality of information systems and processes. It blocks fully leveraging the affordances digitisation brings.

Towards mature data governance, by making inventory
Changing tactics, doing away with the three fences, and focusing on having detailed knowledge of their data is needed. Combining what now are separate and disconnected activities (information security, openness, archiving and personal data protection), into ‘everything by design’. Basically it means turning all you know about your data into metadata that becomes part of your data. So that it will be easy to see which parts of a specific data set contain what type of person related data, which data fields are public, which subset is business critical, the records that have third party rights attached, or which records need to be deleted after a specific amount of time. Don’t man the fences where every check is always extra work, but let the data be able to tell exactly what is or is(n’t) possible, allowed, meant or needed. Getting there starts with making an inventory of what data a local or regional government currently holds, and describing the data in detailed operational, legal and technological terms.

Mature digital data governance: all aspects about the data are part of the data, allowing all processes and decisions access to all relevant material in determining what’s possible.

2: Ways local government data inventories are useful

Inventories are a key first step in doing away with the ineffective fences and towards mature data governance. Inventories are also useful as an instrument for several other purposes.

Local is where you are, but not the data pro’s
There’s a clear reason why local governments don’t have their house in order when it comes to data.
Most of our lives are local. The streets we live on, the shopping center we frequent, the schools we attend, the spaces we park in, the quality of life in our neighbourhood, the parks we walk our dogs in, the public transport we use for our commutes. All those acts are local.
Local governments have a wide variety of tasks, reflecting the variety of our acts. They hold a corresponding variety of data, connected to all those different tasks. Yet local governments are not data professionals. Unlike singular-task, data heavy national government bodies, like the Cadastre, the Meteo institute or the department for motor vehicles, local governments usually don’t have the capacity or capability. As a result local governments mostly don’t know their own data, and don’t have established effective processes that build on that data knowledge. Inventories are a first step. Inventories point to where contracts, procurement and collaboration leads to loss of needed data sovereignty. Inventories also allow determining what, from a technology perspective, is a smooth transition path to the actively open by design end-game local governments envision.

Open data as a policy instrument
Where local governments want to use the data they have as a way to enable others to act differently or in support of policy goals, they need to know in detail which data they hold and what can be done with it. Using open data as policy instrument means creating new connections between stakeholders around a policy issue, by putting the data into play. To be able to see which data could be published to engage certain stakeholders it takes knowing what you have, what it contains, and in which shape you have it first.

Better articulated citizen demands for data
Making public a list of what you have is also important here, as it invites new demand for your data. It allows people to be aware of what data exists, and contemplate if they have a use case for it. If a data set hasn’t been published yet, its existence is discoverable, so they can request it. It also enables local government to extend the data they publish based on actual demand, not assumed demand or blindly. This increases the likelihood data will be used, and increases the socio-economic impact.

Emerging data
More and more new data is emerging, from sensor networks in public and private spaces. This way new stakeholders and citizens are becoming agents in the public space, where they meet up with local governments. New relationships, and new choices result. For instance the sensor in my garden measuring temperature and humidity is part of the citizen-initiated Measure your city network, but also an element in the local governments climate change adaptation policies. For local governments as regulators, as guardian of public space, as data collector, and as source of transparency, this is a rebalancing of their position. It again takes knowing what data you own and how it relates to and complements what others collect and own. Only then is a local government able to weave a network with those stakeholders that connects data into valuable agency for all involved. (We’ve built a guidance tool, in Dutch, for the role of local government with regard to sensors in public spaces)

Having detailed data inventories are a way to start having the right conversations for local governments on all these points.

3: Getting to inventories

To create useful and detailed inventories, as I and my colleagues did for half a dozen local governments, some elements are key in my view. We looked at structured data collections only, so disregarded the thousands of individual once-off spreadsheets. They are not irrelevant, but obscure the wood for the trees. Then we scored all those data sets on up to 80(!) different facets, concerning policy domain, internal usage, current availability, technical details, legal aspects, and concerns etc. A key element in doing that is not making any assumptions:

  • don’t assume your list of applications will tell you what data you have. Not all your listed apps will be used, others won’t be on the list, and none of it tells you in detail what data actually is processed in them, just a generic pointer
  • don’t assume information management knows it all, as shadow information processes will exist outside of their view
  • don’t assume people know when you ask them how they do their work, as their description and rationalisation of their acts will not match up with reality,
    let them also show you
  • don’t assume people know the details of the data they work with, sit down with them and look at it together
  • don’t assume what it says on the tin is correct, as you’ll find things that don’t belong there (we’ve e.g. found domestic abuse data in a data set on litter in public spaces)

Doing an inventory well means

  • diving deeply into which applications are actually used,
  • talking to every unit in the organisation about their actual work and seeing it being done,
  • looking closely at data structures and real data content,
  • looking closely at current metadata and its quality
  • separately looking at large projects and programs as they tend to have their own information systems,
  • going through external communications as it may refer to internally held data not listed elsewhere,
  • looking at (procurement and collaboration) contracts to determine what claims other might have on data,
  • and then cross-referencing it all, and bringing it together in one giant list, scored on up to 80 facets.

Another essential part, especially to ensure the resulting inventory will be used as an instrument, is from the start ensuring the involvement and buy-in of the various parts of local government that usually are islands (IT, IM, legal, policy departments, archivists, domain experts, data experts). So that the inventory is something used to ask a variety of detailed questions of.

bring the islands together
Bring the islands together. (photo Dmitry Teslya CC-BY

We’ve followed various paths to do inventories, sometimes on our own as external team, sometimes in close cooperation with a client team, sometimes a guide for a client team while their operational colleagues do the actual work. All three yield very useful results but there’s a balance to strike between consistency and accuracy, the amount of feasible buy-in, and the way the hand-over is planned, so that the inventory becomes an instrument in future data-discussions.

What comes out as raw numbers is itself often counter-intuitive to local government. Some 98% of data typically held by Dutch Provinces can be public, although usually some 20% is made public (15% open data, usually geo-data). At local level the numbers are a bit different, as local governments hold much more person related data (concerning social benefits for instance, chronic care, and the persons register). About 67% of local data could be public, but only some 5% usually is. This means there’s still a huge gap between what can be open, and what is actually open. That gap is basically invisible if a local government deploys the three fences, and as a consequence they run on assumptions and overestimate the amount that needs the heaviest protection. The gap becomes visible from looking in-depth at data on all pertinent aspects by doing an inventory.

(Interested in doing an inventory of the data your organisations holds? Do get in touch.)