ICEGOV 2014 introduction to Data For DevelopmentPeter Winstanley: 28 October 2014

Scotland is a small country on the north-western edge of Europe. It is a devolved state within the United Kingdom and is known across the world for its people, culture, tartans and whisky. Before I get on with the rest of my talk I want to mention a few points on whisky and tartan that I would like you to keep in mind as I develop the themes of my talk. Both are made of very basic materials (barley and water; wool and dyes) but rather than simply developing a single homogeneous product the whisky and tartan industries have developed a very complex range of products based various mixtures or variations of the products (e.g. single malts and whisky blends and liqueurs; the ancient colours, modern colours, muted colours and weathered colours forms of the MacDonald of Clanranald tartan). They have also developed more ephemeral but extremely valuable ‘products’ in the form of identifying these products with the country and in some part a sense of what it means to be Scottish.

So keeping those thoughts in mind, I’ll return to my main theme. Digging deeper into the country you will find urban, rural and island communities some of which are very remote to the bulk of the population. There are variations in wealth, health, and degree of connection to the social, cultural, educational and economic centres. It is a microcosm of what is found in many other larger countries.

All organisational units, including people, organisations and states, have a need for development.

Development is a word that applies to many domains and situations and encompasses any of a range of activities that lead to maturation, increased efficiency, and so on. It is one of these things where we know it when we see it.

Even the most ‘developed’ countries tend to have areas in need of development, so “development” is something that we are all seeking.

Historically the key change in direction that led to the modern industrial and connected world came from ideas developed by the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723–1790)

Smith’s understanding of the creation of wealth came from an analysis of production (production function), and from that the understanding of economies of scale, and size of market.

In place of Smith’s three factors of production (Land, Production and Capital), the raw material of data can be substituted. We now talk about data as an asset and manage it

We recognise that data can be the raw material of a value chain that leads to the production of knowledge assets. Even the vocabulary that we use borrows words from the world of the extractive industries. We talk about “data mining” and finding “nuggets of information”.

The conduit for data, the Internet, in the main overcomes the barrier of distance and makes the distribution and access of data. The Internet provides in the one step local and global range for the publication and subscription to data services.

The Internet also provides a mechanism for interacting with query and analytical services at a distance – you don’t need to hold data locally in order to work with it.

The Internet provides for data the ‘global market’ that Adam Smith recognised was a key aspect to developing wealth.

Another key idea in development comes from Henry Chesbrough – the notion of ‘open innovation’. Organisational units can no longer afford to rely entirely on their own ideas to advance their development, nor can they restrict their innovations to a single path to development.

With these introductory thoughts in mind, I now want to give an overview of the activities in Scotland that are using data and the Internet to develop the country.

There are 2 key requirements: internet connectivity and digital data Scotland has a very uneven distribution of population, and has many natural barriers to the

installation of fibre and wireless networks (sparsely populated hilly areas, numerous islands, etc) and these militate against free market only solutions to provision of high speed broadband.

To address this, Scotland has developed a partnership approach which embraces national and local Government as well as funding from EU and our enterprise agencies. National and local government worked together to deliver the roll out of next generation broadband in order to deliver access to a next generation fibre broadband network to 85% of premises by end 2015/16 and 95% of premises by end 2017. We have also established Community Broadband Scotland as an initiative to help communities that lie outside of the next generation footprint to develop connectivity solutions that are designed to meet their specific needs.

The public sector needs good internet connection too – net-centric operations are key to developing modern services. In Scotland the government strategy has been to establish a single public sector wide area network. The SWAN (Scottish Wide Area Network) programme began in October 2012 with a procurement programme that will cost in the region of £325 million over a 9 year period and will deliver a single, secure public services communications network available for the use of any, and potentially all, public service organisations. The key approach here was to bring everything together so that economies of scale can be realised. This is a practical application of Adam Smith’s insight into the creation of wealth.

The SWAN programme created some unease and resulted in legal challenge from some existing suppliers to the public sector, and this is the sort of practical problem one needs to be aware of when embarking on this route. The Scottish Government’s successful rebuttal of court action may have useful lessons for others wanting to go down this route.

In addition to the cable/fibre connectivity, in Scotland we are looking to increase wireless coverage which has been very uneven and still has considerable room for improvement. Improvements to wireless coverage have to be made by commercial organisations and the routes for the Scottish Government to steer these come from encouraging re-use of existing mast and other facilities, simplifying the planning process for operators introducing 4G, defining levels of coverage and service delivery as conditions for the broadcasting licenses, and working with the regulator (OFCOM). There was for example, a great degree of cooperation between national and local government and the mobile network operators when it came to delivering the connectivity required to make the Commonwealth Games and Ryder Cup successful international events.

So, in countries like Scotland the efforts to bring Internet connectivity to static sites and to mobile appliances is a collaborative effort between government and industry. It helps both as it improves the scope for e-governance and the promotion of government policies in all areas whilst at the same time opening new markets for the sale of goods and services from the complete value chain of digital and other types of business. It challenges the regulatory regimes covering broadcasting rights, the radio spectrum, data and privacy protection, advertising standards, competition and regulation of monopoly and monopsony, to name a few, and the challenge of government here is to ensure that it provides the right balance and acts timeously and not erratically so that it doesn’t impede development whilst at the same time guarding rights and protecting society.

To keep pace with the new opportunities for digital transactions and wider e-governance the UK and Scottish Governments have been over many years developing digital services

in the areas of taxation, licensing and taxation of vehicles, passport and driving license application processing, processing of unemployment benefit and so on, such that within the UK now the regular activities such as vehicle taxation are totally conducted as internet transactions.

In the commercial world too, the market of online commerce and banking, and the delivery of cultural services such as music, books and films to both static and mobile devices is absolutely the norm. It is commonplace for people to own and use multiple mobile phones, and to also use mobile-enabled tablets as well as more static, home-based computing devices, including dedicated devices (set top boxes) for television and other broadcast services.

However, not everyone is ‘connected’ in this way, and this presents a problem for government and society, because it is in great part a reflection of either poverty or a skills deficient populations that will become disenfranchised as the wholesale movement to delivery of services through the internet develops further (and this has been recognised as an issue with vehicle tax and unemployment benefit).

Scottish Government has recognised this with the publication of its Digital Participation Strategy. This describes a partnership between Government, industry and the third sector to promote digital participation and focus on those communities and groups; the elderly, those on low income, people living in social housing that are particularly likely to find themselves excluded from the digital world. Interestingly, Scottish Government has provided significant funding for a third sector organisation, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations to deliver much of this policy, believing that that the third sector is in a unique position of trust when it comes to supporting and training people to engage digitally for the first time

I am not going to deal specifically with the issue of inequality of access other than to note that it exists and it is something that is being given attention by central and local government in Scotland, and the voluntary and commercial sectors. I do want to use it to signify that there is room for improvement across many dimensions of life in Scotland. So, if we have easy access to good internet speeds for static and mobile devices, what sorts of activities are we engaging in in Scotland that are developmental?

I will give a quick tour of a range of activities under the following headings:o Infrastructure and standardso National and local governmento Social and culturalo Academico Commercial/Entrepreneurial

Infrastructure and standards Central government in Scotland has moved almost completely to using virtualised servers.

The development of standard builds for operating systems and software, automated build processes and the centralisation of management that virtualisation provides reduces costs and also power consumption (and therefore CO2 emissions) compared with the hardware it replaces.

In combination with the SWAN programme covering the public sector network that I described earlier, the work on the server and networks infrastructure of the public sector is resulting in a simplification of design and also of the contracting and management aspects.

The delivery of a more cohesive approach to the delivery of public services has been underpinned by bringing together previously separate sections of the government civil service in Scotland into a single “Digital Directorate” to ensure a coherent approach is taken and top optimise the deployment of government resources.

Whilst Scottish Government prefers to talk about “Digital First” or “Digital by Choice” rather than the UK Government’s focus on “digital by default’ it is determined to move an increasing number of public services online and ensure that in doing so we improve the quality of service and the quality of experience we are able to offer. We have had having had several years’ experience of having many different sites hosting government services, we now think that residents and citizens will benefit more from a single web presence for government that organises, and helps to navigate to these digital services – the http://mygov.scot site is in active development.

The UK Government recognised a few years back that the use of software that restricted users to proprietary standards of data interchange meant that there was a commercial ‘lock in’ that prevented substitution of software and reduced scope for interoperability. Also, because these proprietary standards often involved use of expensive software, their use often prevented smaller companies from contracting for government IT work. The proprietary standards and associated restrictive licensing was an impediment to the development of software SMEs. The UK Government developed a set of principles (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-principles/open-standards-principles ) and the Open Standards Board is charged with researching and bringing in to use a set of open standards that will be adequate to support government IT developments. http://standards.data.gov.uk/

In addition to technical standards on things like formats and protocols, the UK government also has work ongoing to refresh or develop metadata and controlled vocabulary elements that are necessary for semantic interoperability of data.

To ensure a strategic and coherent approach to the effective use and management of data in Scotland we established a Data Management Board (2013), which includes representation from public sector and industry and subject matter experts. We have set out our data vision for a Scotland by 2020, which recognises the value of data and responsibly makes use of data to improve public services and deliver wider societal and economic benefits for all.

Scotland will shortly publish its Open Data Strategy, with key drivers being 1. Delivery of improved public services through public bodies making use of the data 2. Wider social and economic benefits through innovative use of the data 3. Accountability and transparency of delivery of our public services

European legislation is helping to drive the publication of more data, this includes the EC INSPIRE Directive which has a pre-defined set of data incorporating a spatial dimension and a fixed timetable determined by the EC, and the EC Public Sector Information Directive (2003 and 2013). One of the key purposes of the PSI Directive is to ensure that much of the public sector information is made available in re-usable formats and taking into account (e.g. licensing) that it will be re-used in ways outwith the purposes for which it might have been initially collected/created. It also reinforces that data should be made available for no or no more than marginal cost, and that where there is charging that the mechanism is transparent.

Exactly what the best practices are for publishing data in re-usable ways as envisaged by the EC in the PSI Directive and related communications is something under active investigation by the W3C/EC-funded “Share-PSI 2.0” project. I will be giving a session at the end of the conference specifically on this project.

Data collected for administrative purposes has considerable value from the point of view of management information. In a ‘Digital By Choice’ environment each interaction that residents and citizens have with government will have a digital record. In Scotland a process of record linkage is being used to connect datasets together at the level of the individual but in a way that protects privacy. This work is being overseen by the Data

Linkage Framework Board. Maintaining public confidence is at the heart of our Data Vision.

Data collected for statistical purposes by government is published using a range of geographical denominators including areas of constant population (data zones, census output areas etc ) and areas relating to the political and administrative boundaries (electoral wards, local authority areas etc).

Unlike many other countries, data derived from postal service codes and addresses, and data from the national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, is in general only made available under a restrictive, commercial license, though there has recently been a move by the Ordnance Survey to make a subset of their data available on an open license.

National and local government data So, given these drivers and approaches to the publication of data from government, what

is actually happening? How is this data being used to drive development? Government in Scotland has a very long history of publishing statistical data, and the trend

now is to recognise that the publications are of wider potential use than the statisticians previously catered for. This is especially the case when it comes to small area and census related statistical data where nowadays it might be used in very fine grain form by applications on mobile devices to help describe the neighbourhood that people are passing through.

As a consequence, the Scottish Government is moving from publishing the Scottish Neigbourhood Statistics as a large CSV or XML download or making the data available only from a dedicated website to publishing the data as RDF Linked Data both through a Linked Data API and a SPARQL endpoint.

The large datasets coming from administrative data, health data, and traffic or environmental sensors have led to the creation of a new set of research institutes and ‘smart city’ programmes in Scotland. The purpose is to try to convert big, complex and potentially messy data into human-usable knowledge that might be able to bring about improvements and efficiencies in existing processes, or might lead to other discoveries that improve the quality of life locally and nationally. These are the aspirations, but at present we are mainly engaged in the early stages of setting up these data streams and the operational frameworks to do this.

The work on these data is being done by various consortia that are a mix of public and private sector organisations.

Examples of workstreams using administrative and health data include:o Administrative Data Research Centreo Digital Health Instituteo Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre

At the more local scale, cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen are each engaged in making data at different scales available for use to improve the quality of life in the city.

Glasgow are working with the UK Technology Strategy Board to develop a set of demonstrator projects that illustrate how data can be used to improve city living. These demonstrators include building a ‘city observatory’ that will bring together traffic flow, CCTV and other data to develop some operational and predictive analysis of how a city operates with the intention of improving the quality of life in the city and making operations more efficient.

Social & Cultural Over the past 2-3 years cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and smaller

rural areas such as Dumfries and its surrounding area have recognised that by making

small local datasets publicly available they can encourage the use of local residents to use these to develop web and mobile device applications that improve the quality of life for their neighbourhoods and at the same time perhaps develop a source of income either through the sale of the application or service that they have developed, or from advertising revenue associated with its use.

Each of these cities have run ‘hack days’ which have been popular, particularly with local residents who attend the local universities and schools of art and design.

They have also included participation from the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Scottish Linked Data Interest Group, Young Rewired State and other groups that are involved in promoting the publication of open data from public sector bodies, or introducing young people to programming and data analysis for personal and civic good.

These ‘hack day’ events encourage local residents to identify challenges and problems associated with living in their area and give them the opportunity to collaborate with the local authority to develop solutions to these problems. Generally the solutions are developed using data that the local authority have always had but had not made available and in a machine-manipulable form. Equally, they have been developed by the types of people who have always lived in that city area but have not previously been engaged in such a direct way with their local authority.

The end result of these ‘hack days’ tends to be enhanced engagement between residents and their city administration, the publication and enhancement of datasets from local authorities, and the development of a range of applications, some of which might get developed further.

One example from Edinburgh is the improvement to the scheduling and routing of the vehicles used by the team managing the distribution of mobility aids for elderly people within the city. Another example is a hardware solution allowing visually impaired people to locate and interact with street crossing signals using their mobile phones.

As the culture of these ‘hack days’ has developed, people have realised that they are not only events for people interested in computer programming or data analysis. Around Glasgow and elsewhere small community groups have come together to record information about their communities and activities using Wikipedia. By using Wikipedia they recognise that some core data from Infoboxes etc will automatically and regularly be incorporated into DBPedia and so become part of the Linked Data Cloud/

The development of community-generated digital data assets to improve the quality of life is being promoted in Scotland to help those with long term health conditions. The ALISS project ( http://www.aliss.org/ ) provides a software framework that allows groups with long term health conditions to share bookmarks to web based resources that they found helpful. These ALISS repositories can be federated and aggregated using machine methods. Improving self-management of long term health conditions reduces the long run impact of the condition on the individual, reduces the long run costs to the social health care system, and increases the chances that the individual will become or continue to be economically active.

Another route to improving long term health using digital data is illustrated in Project Ginsberg (https://www.ginsberg.io/ ). Ginsberg is a tool to help you find out more about how you feel. By choosing the areas of your wellbeing you want to improve and tracking some personal information, Ginsberg will give you insights into your mood and behaviour that can help you feel more connected, optimistic, energetic and happy. If you're stressed, anxious or have low mood, Ginsberg can help you take control of your mental wellbeing.

In the cultural dimension there is considerable activity in Scotland to provide digital data to act as a cultural repository and a route to liberating these assets from the physical constraints of a library, gallery or museum and enabling them to be used freely or at low

cost to enrich the lives of people in Scotland, to promote the image of Scotland abroad and to encourage and facilitate tourism. Key to these assets are the national collections of books [http://www.nls.uk/] , art works [https://www.nationalgalleries.org/], museums [http://www.nms.ac.uk/] and architecture [http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/ and http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/] , and other less expected collections such as the national register of tartans [ https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/ ] Equally the records of vital events are a significant cultural dataset that are key to genealogical research and which frequently stimulate visits by the Scottish diaspora and those interested in Scottish history. In Scotland the image repositories and genealogical records are run on a lightweight commercial basis by trusts [e.g. SCRAN - http://www.scran.ac.uk and ScotlandsPeople - http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ ]. Other record repositories of a more commercial nature that publish government data are the records of property transactions in the Scottish land & property registry [ http://www.ros.gov.uk/ ] and the census data [ http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/ ].

Academic Community As I mentioned earlier in the section about administrative data, consortia of public and

private sector organisations are involved in working with these datasets as they provide an excellent opportunity to develop, test and evaluate approaches to working with large datasets, streaming data and messy data. Key members of these consortia are academic institutions, and most universities in Scotland have some involvement here. It is not only the computing science and statistics departments that are involved, but also geography, economics, medicine, agriculture, art and design – in fact, pretty much the full spectrum of university study has some representation.

This interplay between the public datasets and the challenging technical or academic problems that universities work on is going to enhance the “relevance” of research, help prepare university research students to work on projects that are going to deliver improvements across the spectrum for the country in which they live, and is providing opportunities for closer “town and gown” collaboration. University students make up a large proportion of the members of the ‘hack days’ that the cities in Scotland run. There are also more regional interactions between academe and local communities such as dot.rural [ http://www.dotrural.ac.uk ] in the north east of Scotland, and national interactions from centres based in relatively remote parts of the country such as the Crichton Carbon Centre [ http://www.carboncentre.org/ ] in Dumfries which use data and the web to improve remote areas or to deliver academic expertise located in a remote area to a global market.

Universities in Scotland have had a global outlook over centuries. There are longstanding connections between Scottish universities and global development especially in the fields of medicine, agriculture, divinity and business. This is continuing in the modern idiom of MOOCs – Massively Open Online Courses. Scottish Universities such as Edinburgh University are contributing online courses to the Coursera and FutureLearn platforms. [http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/online-learning/moocs/moocs ] and this brings me back to the Open Innovation theme of Henry Chesbrough. In the internet age you don’t need to provide all the component parts in order to deliver a product – something appropriate might be available at little or no cost from elsewhere.

Economic Activity So what about completely commercial activities in Scotland? How can data on the web be

seen to promote and support serious economic activity? The Scottish Government are supporting incubators for start-ups in the data-driven

economy through the Scottish Funding Council. The DataLab [http://www.thedatalab.com/ ] will act as a nurturing environment. Another illustration of a nurturing environment in Scotland is CodeBase [ http://www.thisiscodebase.com/ ] in Edinburgh. Codebase is

entirely funded by private equity and is the largest IT company “incubator” in the UK. Its partners includes CERN for knowledge transfer, accountancy and business strategy advice firms and a range of venture capital providers. Incubators such as the DataLab and CodeBase provide nascent companies with office space, high speed internet connections, access to advice, collaboration opportunities with other nascent companies and access to venture capital providers.

But what about the materials that a start-up might use? Unlike the production function that Adam Smith described in which land is a restricted resource. If I have the land I can prevent you from using it and keep its productive output for myself. Open data is not constrained in this way. Multiple organisations can be using the same data and each be deriving a different output. Multiple value chains can be created on data that is readily accessible. Given the availability of open source software, Platform As A Service (PAAS) providers such Amazon and RedHat, and open data from the public sector and other sources, anyone anywhere who has internet connection and the appropriate skill set (which, incidentally, they can get from the excellent MOOCs from Coursera, EDx, FutureLearn and other sources) can begin to develop data products that could potentially have a global market.

One example from Scotland is Skyscanner – the global search portal for travel including flights, hotels and car rental – [ http://www.skyscanner.net/ ]. The US investor group Sequoia hails this as “one of the best technology companies ever to come out of Europe”. In 11 years, from a very non-traditional start for a tech company, Skyscanner has over 30 million users, a fifth of which come from Asia.

So this concludes my quick tour of data for development as seen from a Scottish perspective. Adam Smith laid the theoretical foundations for understanding how wealth was created through the application of capital and productive labour on raw materials. He also introduced in his description of the pin factory the definitive idea of the division of labour to create a value chain and to improve productivity. Finally he recognised the need to maximise sales through developing global markets. Traditional Scottish industries such as Scotch Whisky or Tartan manufacture illustrate the benefits from the development of a diverse range of products of high value from a small set of base materials. Connection to the Internet gives anyone access to both local and global markets, and, following Chesbrough’s ideas, if you don’t have enough of the base material, raw data, available locally to develop a data product then you can look for opportunities to find some within any other country that is publishing open data.