Data Sharing and Standardization: Enabling more effective data collaborations
This post is part of a series created by the California Public Technology Roundtable. Read more about the Roundtable, see a list of all participants, and learn more about our first meeting here.
The second highest priority from the “all our ideas” poll surfacing hopes and dreams for the new Office of Digital Innovation (ODI) calls for California to “Pioneer the development and implementation of standards for interoperability of data sets that are critical to the state’s goals.” New data initiatives can build on work such as the City of Los Angeles’ development of the Mobility Data Specification or California water utilities working to develop open and machine readable water rate information.
Those data standards are complemented by a more nuanced approach to open data that incorporates streamlined sharing of data that can be opened up entirely on the web, which is consistent with California’s new Open Data Policy. It’s important to remember that the UK’s Government Digital Service, the first unit of its kind in the world and inspiration for many similar initiatives to California’s Office of Digital Innovation, was also complimented by the development of the Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN). That latter data-focused effort centralized and streamlined existing administrative data. Several California initiatives already exist including the City of LA’s Data Science Federation (which empowers collaboration between city departments and academic partners), California Data Collaborative (which brings together water utilities across the state) and California Policy Lab (which supports empirical research into crime and other social problems).
“Access to sensitive public data should be streamlined for academic research and shared using industry best practices in ethical and secure computational social science.”
-California Public Technology Principles (bit.ly/californias_future)
Those academic partnerships provide an excellent foundation to use data to inform decision makers and also support government staff in improving their skills. Participants at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy roundtable highlighted the critical importance of building the internal capacity for better digital services across the entire organization. Harvard’s Kennedy School has an excellent framework for measuring digital maturity and the Data Cabinet’s data maturity model is another reference point. Local governments at the Pepperdine roundtable shared many inspiring case studies of how public servants in their organizations found creative ways to reinvent their roles and better tackle public challenges. California’s Government Operations Agency (“Gov Ops”) has shown great leadership in this regard by modernizing civil service and developing a new data classification job series.
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