Share-PSI 2.0 Best Practice

Source: Best Practices/Holistic Metrics

Outline of the best practice

Using a variety of metrics at different levels of the organisation to assess the value and impact of sharing PSI.

Management summary

Challenge

Sharing PSI requires effort and effort costs money. Budget holders will, of course, need strong justification for spending any money on making data available - an activity that, from their perspective, is likely to be new. The PSI Directive mandates that data should be available for free or at marginal cost, that is, making the data available cannot itself be a revenue generator although charges may be levied to cover the difference between keeping the data within the organisation and making it available.

If the only metric applied is whether the department that generates and shares the data receives financial compensation for doing so, then the assessment is very likely to be unfavourable.

Solution

Making an assessment of the value and impact of sharing public sector information at a level above the individual department(s) responsible for doing so.

Best Practice identification

Why is this a Best Practice? What’s the impact of the Best Practice

Taking a range of metrics at a higher level can show significant benefits to an organisation as a whole, such as greater efficiency, improved fulfillment of the public task and increased transparency.

Links to the PSI Directive

Policies and Legislation

Why is there a need for this Best Practice?

Making an assessment of the value and impact of sharing public sector information based on a wide range of metrics will support the PSI Directive implementation which mandates that data should be available for free or at marginal cost.

What do you need for this Best Practice?

How this is done will depend very much on the specific circumstances but typically it means that the assessment is carried out against the whole cross-agency plan.

Some individual departments, or sub-departments, are likely to see increased costs with no direct benefit to that department but at a higher level, the benefits should be evident and measurable. Factors to bear in mind include, but are not limited to:

• the reduction in time spent dealing with individual requests for information;

• the reduction in the load on the Web site due to the elimination of traffic from screen scrapers;

• improved delivery of services, perhaps including new services;

• improved transparency, perhaps measured by the number of news items referring to published information;

• improved data quality due to more users able to detect errors;

All these in addition to the typical metrics of the number of downloads of a particular dataset and the number of external applications built on top of the data.

Applicability by other Member States

The approach is applicable to any Member State.

Contact info

Noël van Herreweghe, noel.vanherreweghe@bz.vlaanderen.be

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