Have your say on government data policy

Interhacktives

On this week's 'Data Day', Ayushman Basu and Luke Barratt discuss the opening of a survey for journalists by the Government Statistical Survey. The Government is looking for feedback on how to improve their provision of open data. You can respond to the survey here: http://bit.ly/2jU47je The main focus of the survey is on the possibility of creating a single outlet for releasing data from the government, and on this podcast, we discuss some of the inconvenience of the current system. Datasets have to be sourced from various different portals and subsequently combined, which creates significant delays for journalists. The survey is not especially focused on data quality, but we discuss the importance of this issue, which is made more serious by the worrying fact that the government has no centralised policy on data quality. Finally, since Ayushman Basu has specific experience in this area, we discuss how some of these issues present themselves in India. The government there has a central data portal, but the quality of releases is very poor, with PDFs often used instead of Excel spreadsheets. India’s large population also makes data collection very difficult. India’s government data portal can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/2jU26DJ