Publish Government data digitally and proactively including accounts, decisions, and performance

Good information drives good decision making, and builds trust in Government and the services delivered.

Jersey’s Government and assembly already publish data in various ways, including;

• States Assembly Reports: Reports by ministers or in response to Assembly decisions to request publication, including the Budget and the Annual Report and Accounts
• Government Open Datasets: A set of datasets published on opendata.gov.je, including Stats Jersey data and some other key datasets.
• Government Mapping Data: Various Geospatial datasets hosted to view (but not download) on https://govje.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html
• Freedom of Information Requests: Data is often published in response to FOIs on an ad-hoc basis.
• Registers: Public Registers such as the Planning portal

These are just some of the sources of data that are published, but accessing and using it isn’t consistent. The costs of running departments, investment in capital, staff numbers, etc are hidden in pages of PDFs, or published in ad-hoc locations.

A Data Strategy that is actually delivered

We need to publish more data, and the data already public in a consistent manner.

To do this, we must develop a Data Strategy that captures the datasets that exist in Government, and build a consistent and maintainable approach to provide this to the public. It will require standards to be adopted and enforced where necessary.

From a technology side, this is our change to make great strides. Building a data-first culture should reduce repetitive work that is done compiling sources, and enable quicker more informed decisions.

Data to how the Government operates will build trust, and a unified and simple to access place to find can gain civic engagement.

Will it make a difference?

I’m confident that if we adopt a data-first approach to Government, the opportunities above will be realised. My free web service, digitalStates.je, has digitised all speeches in the Assembly, and tagged these to the States Member that said it. I am seeing daily use from islanders now using this data - enabling them to find out about their politicians and take a bigger part in political awareness.