Using open data for insights into Australian-registered charities

Rosie Williams of OpenAus recently released her latest open data project, Open Charities, to provide insight into the financials of Australian charities.

The service integrates the available open data from 53,000 registered Australian charities in a way never done before, allowing fast and simple analysis of charities by location, electorate and issue.

To fund this work on an ongoing basis Rosie has also introduced a subscriber-only feature at $50 per year which provides access to information on all of the government grants and tenders won by each charity - connecting together several different open datasets.

This information is useful not only for people considering donating to different Australian charities, but also for charities seeking to research their sector and those thinking about creating new charities.

It's important to note that all of the value unlocked by Open Charities and similar open sites would not be available if not for the hard work by volunteers such as Rosie.

There's still too few of these volunteers, meaning that there's potentially immense value left untapped across the tens of thousands of open datasets now released by Australian Government.

This means there's still enormous opportunities to identify and realise value for startups and social enterprises seeking new ways to repurpose data into useful knowledge.

If you've ever had an interest in finding solutions to social and economic problems, why not take a look at Rosie's work and think about the value you could add.

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Presentation on digital citizenship, user experience & the emerging role of libraries

The other week I was in Wellington, New Zealand for the international Linked up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship conference.

Below is my presentation from the day, including the story of a recent customer experience with an Australian government agency.

For other presentations from the day visit nsla.org.au/digital-citizenship-2015.

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Australian Government's decision to join the Open Government Partnership should help us come together to forge better outcomes

Last week the Australian Government announced that it was taking steps to join the global Open Government Partnership (OGP).

What's the OGP? it's a voluntary, multi-stakeholder international initiative supported by 69 national governments that was created out of the open government / Government 2.0 movement to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

This is a decision that has taken some time to make. While Australia was invited to join as a founding member of the OGP (with eight other nations) in August 2011, the then Labor government didn't make announce an intent to join until 2013.

After this, a change in government saw the decision revisited and ultimately put on hold, as the new Coalition government reduced the policy emphasis on government openness and transparency.

However, with the recent fresh wind blowing through government with a change in Prime Minister, openness and transparency has returned to the national Coalition policy agenda.

One outcome was the announcement of 17 November by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet that Australia was taking the necessary steps to become a full member of the OGP.

More information on this decision and what it involves in practice, both for government and for civil society, is available on the new ogpau.govspace.gov.au website.

While overall there's been positive feedback from the 'insider' community that have been interested in this decision, there's also been some criticism of the process as it has been laid out.

Given this is the first time the Australian government has developed an OGP plan, I'm not that concerned about the process being perfect.The fact that it has started is the crucial point.

I expect the process will improve into future planning cycles as all participants - government, civil societies and the community - gain an appreciation of the most effective ways to work together in this type of endeavour.

We can learn from the experience of other countries, which is well summed up in this OGP report, however the Australian experience will be unique and hopefully all participants will approach this current process with good faith and a willingness to 'learn on the job'.

The most important outcome of this first OGP process isn't the first National Action Plan for Australia, it's the relationships and understandings forged between government and non-government open government players that will positively contribute to an evolving relationship.

While backbiting and criticising may get a good media run, it seldom builds strong workable relationships, if not framed within a context of identifying and implementing improvements.

OGP membership is an opportunity to build the transparency culture in Australia, bridge gaps and build a strong civil community. Let's maximise its value both for citizens and government.

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Guest post: Moving things forward – addressing the information gaps

This is a guest post written by Rosie Williams, a leading Australian Open Data Developer and Citizen Journalist, who created and manages infoAus.net and writes for NoFibs.com.au. It's republished from OpenAus with her permission.

The Power to Persuade blog fosters new ways to collaborate across sectors for better social policy. Power to Persuade recently published a post of mine on open data in which I argued for the role of transparency in addressing social policy questions.

I recounted a recent attempt to discover the number of homeless shelters across Australia, only to be met with a quote for over $1,000 in consideration of it not being previously published and due to difficulties in extracting the information from the system. The most interesting thing bar the cost of the service is that the reason I was forced to seek this data directly from the AIHW in the first place was exactly because I had not found it in any of the reports published by government or community sector.

As a financial and political transparency activist I have been looking into how decisions regarding the funding of housing/homeless services flow through the policy process in order to understand why such a substantial unmet need for specialist homeless services is tolerated. Australian Institute of Health & Welfare figures show that nearly 60% of people making a request for accommodation on any given day are turned away. I want to understand what process leads to this outcome.

I have also heard privately from service providers, the very organisations required to report their own data to government that they do not have access to key metrics.

Open data is a fairly new concept for Australia.Open data is data that is made available free for re-use for commercial or non-commercial purposes. The government is yet to fulfil it’s obligations to the Open Government Partnership although there are rumours this is finally about to change. The OGP requires the Australian government to submit a National Action Plan detailing extensive consultation in the areas of fiscal transparency, access to information, income and asset disclosure, and citizen engagement, all areas which affect our power to make society answerable to our needs and the needs of the vulnerable.

The government has been opening data for the last few years but there are few instances of that data being re-used. My own projects in financial and political transparency are an exception. The Commonwealth government is now implementing new grants reporting requirements to provide consistency in reporting grant recipients and locations for every relevant agency. This data set is not yet complete or available in one spot but what is available is searchable at OpenAus.

It is only when data is put to use for a specific purpose that it becomes obvious where data sets are missing or data quality needs work. One of the biggest challenges to open data is where the need for data crosses jurisdictional boundaries as it does with many questions of social policy. Issues such as domestic violence or homelessness require data not just from federal services but also state agencies. With every state potentially doing it’s own thing with regard to data collection and publication, trying to find or use data covering multiple agencies or jurisdictions is a major hurdle in any attempt to make use of open data in Australia for improved transparency, policy or practice.

To address these issues, there needs to be engagement between jurisdictions and also between sectors. Government agencies responsible for gathering and publishing data need to engage with both end users of that data and contributors to that data in order to improve quality and foster awareness of the existence and uses for that data.

To provide a pathway forward I have set up a Slack community open to practitioners in social and data science, researchers and government. The goals of this community are as follows:

Community Goals

• provide venue to engage end users of data, organisations contributing data to government and data custodians to better address social issues
• lobby for improved data and transparency
• provide answers on specific data questions eg where can I find information on x?
• run events /produce materials in support of these goals

Community Participants

This community is for practitioners, researchers, policy makers and anyone who can provide assistance to these groups in terms of answering questions about where data can be found and what can be done with it.

My various networks cross the boundaries of journalism, technology, data science and politics. Providing a bridge between these groups paves the way for people with diverse skills and information to come together to help professional communities realise their aims. If you would like access to this community please email me from your work account for an invitation.

Slack is a platform that allows for chat between teams and private messaging and integrates with a host of other services. It is easy to join and use, taking the place of both email and forums for purposes of discussion and planning.

How to Participate

Email Rosie at admin @ openaus.net.au from your work email to enable me to send you the invitation.

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Can an AI understand your online personality? How about your agency's online persona?

I've been having a play with IBM Watson's Personality Insights Service.

The service uses "linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through blogs, tweets, forum posts, and more."

While this is quite a mouthful, the service provides an interesting external perspective on how individuals and organisations present themselves online.

As a benchmark, this is how Watson sees me from my last dozen blog posts in eGovAU (excluding the guest posts):

You are shrewd, skeptical and tranquil. 

You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. And you are imaginative: you have a wild imagination. 

Experiences that give a sense of prestige hold some appeal to you. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person.

In a nutshell that's not too bad an analysis.

However what happens when we analyse a government agency's social media presence?

In this case I decided to analyse the Digital Transition Office (DTO), by taking all their blog posts from July to November (excluding guest posts) and plugging them into the Watson Personality analyser.

So this is how Watson sees the personality of the DTO:

You are heartfelt and rational.  

You are self-controlled: you have control over your desires, which are not particularly intense. You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. And you are proud: you hold yourself in high regard, satisfied with who you are.  

Experiences that make you feel high efficiency are generally unappealing to you. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you.

Now that's a pretty good result for an organisation (except maybe the pride bit). 

It seems to me that the personality that the DTO is projecting through their blog is fairly close to the approach and persona that the DTO wishes to portray within government and more broadly in the community.

Now how about another agency...

Here's a review of the Department of Immigration's Migration blog, taking all blog posts from October 2014 onwards (to provide a sample of the same size as the DTO and my blog).

Here's what Watson said about the Department of Immigration's blog's personality:

You are heartfelt, tranquil and skeptical. 

You are calm under pressure: you handle unexpected events calmly and effectively. You are self-assured: you tend to feel calm and self-assured. And you are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. 

Experiences that make you feel high well-being are generally unappealing to you. 

You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in life: you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person.

On the money, or off the mark?


Now of course this kind of process is flawed. An AI can only read the words it sees, it doesn't have a broader picture of an individual or organisation and it has been programmed to respond in given ways to given words or phrases.

However it does highlight an important point about communicating online, and in every medium, in the way you wish to be seen.

Does your online persona represent how you wish to be seen? Is it consistent across platforms? Is it appropriate to your organisation's goals?

It's worth using tools like this to check how your organisation is communicating and identify if there's attributes you are portraying which are contrary to how you wish to be seen.

If your online persona isn't aligned closely with your goals it can create issues in how people see you and how they engage with you - leading to greater negativity in interactions and diminishing trust and respect.

So think carefully about every post, tweet and status update - do they represent and reinforce your organisational values, or do they damage your image in the public eye.

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