Slides from the paper titled 'Towards an Expanded and Integrated Open Government Data Agenda for India' presented at ICEGOV, in Seoul on October 22, 2013. Paper can be accessed here: https://github.com/ajantriks/writings/blob/master/sumandro_expanded_and_integrated_ogd_agenda_for_India.md

1. Towards an Expanded and Integrated
Open Government Data Agenda for India
Sumandro Chattapadhyay
HasGeek Media LLP
The Sarai Programme, CSDS
www.ajantriks.net
@ajantriks

2. The argument
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The existing (open) government data agenda in India
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Expanding the government data agenda (to connect with
national e-governance initiatives)
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Integrating the government data agenda (with relevant
government information policies)

3. Introduction to an ongoing research
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'Opening government data by mediation: Exploring the Roles,
Practices and Strategies of Data Intermediary Organisations
in India'
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A study by HasGeek Media LLP, Bangalore, as part of the
'Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing
Countries' research network managed by World Wide Web
Foundation and supported by International Development
Research Centre, Canada
/
Principal investigators: Sumandro Chattapadhyay and
Zainab Bawa (Co-Founder, HasGeek)
/
Research schedule: May 2013 – April 2014

4. National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy
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Drafted by Department of Science and Technology
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First draft version made public on May 2011
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Gazette notification on 17th March 2012
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A policy for internal and public sharing of (Central) government
data in both human- and machine-readable forms
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Explicit recommendation of open standards, but no mention
of open licenses
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Mandates development of <http://data.gov.in/> portal, with
National Informatics Centre, Department of Electronics and IT,
as nodal agency for implementation

5. data.gov.in

6. data.gov.in: History
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Powered by Open Government Platform <ogpl.gov.in>, an
open source Drupal-based data and content management
system, developed by NIC in collaboration with the Office of
Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, General Services
Administration, Government of United State of America
/
Leverages and builds upon the best practices and features of
<data.gov> and <india.gov.in>
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First public version of the portal was launched on May 21, 2012
/
Second version of the portal, moving from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7,
is about to be launched in near future

7. data.gov.in: Functions
/
Unified catalog of datasets published by various central
government agencies, including both data stored at the data
portal itself and data stored in the server of the agency
/
Users, both governmental and non-governmental, can browse
the dataset catalog, view the metadata, comment on and rank
various aspects of the dataset, create basic visualisations by
choosing variables from the dataset, download available
datasets and submit request for those that are not available yet
/
Data controllers from all government agencies can contribute,
edit, update datasets, and track related activities, including
comments and rankings

8. The present challenges
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Slow, piecemeal, irregular and heterogeneous availability of
data in the portal
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Ensuring contribution of data to the portal is a highly labourand time-intensive process at the moment
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Separated policy and process frameworks for proactive and
reactive disclosure of data
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Centralised source of data availability vs. dispersed user groups
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Availability of national-scale data vs. demand for local data

9. Expanding the agenda through interoperability
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Insufficient cross-agency harmonisation of data operations
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Lack of government-wide interoperability framework and
national enterprise architecture
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Implementation of NDSAP may create a backwards push for
the agencies to re-organise their data management practices
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Crucial opportunity to harmonise, in both technical and
semantic terms, data management processes across agencies
/
NDSAP conceptualises <data.gov.in> both as a portal for
citizens to access government data, as well as for
intra-governmental data sharing (often of 'sensitive' data)

10. Expanding the agenda through decentralisation
/
An important aspect of the OGD agenda is enabling
discoverability and autonomous utilisation (commercial or
non-commercial) of various fragments of government data,
without it necessarily being part of a structured citizen
engagement exercise
/
For this, it is important to decentralise the points of supply of
open government of data
/
This is not an argument against centralised web-infrastructure
for managing government data but for allowing administrative
priviledges to local creators, publishers, and re-users of
government data (such as municipality authority and
government schools) to make use of centralised
web-infrastructure to serve open government data (and
data-based services) at the most local level

11. Integrating the agenda with information policies
/
Expansion of the proactive disclosure mandate and its
integration with the agenda of reactive disclosure of public
information, which is governed by the Right to Information Act
/
Memo circulated by the Department of Personnel and Training,
on 15th April 2013, specifies the guidelines for implementation
of suo motu disclosure of information under section 4 of the
RTI Act, which emphasised the need for proactive disclosure
but did not specify how it was to be operationalised
/
The guidelines make it obligatory for all government agencies
to declare on the website the detailed list of all datasets
managed and those that are publicly available, as well as to
disclose all RTI requests received by the agency concerned and
the respective responses given out

12. Towards an expanded and integrated agenda
/
India is presently experiencing an emerging agenda for
proactive disclosure of government data and information,
well-premised upon both the older (and relatively more driven
by peoples’ organisations) ‘right to information’ movement and
the newer (and relatively more driven by technical and policy
analyst communities) ‘open data’ advocacy.
/
An evolving governance context that is transforming towards
greater dependence on and sophistication of data-driven
decision making
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Possibility of creating an impact in not only opening up
government data for creation of various data products and
services, but also for advancing a greater public monitoring of
and participation in government activities.

13. But what about the demand side?
/
It is not very clear how data and information published by
Government of India, either as open data or not, flow through
and is transformed and translated by various organisational
nodes to ultimately effect and inform grass-root campaigns and
focused advocacies
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Who mediates between the government who publishes data
and the citizen who uses the data?
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The need to study existing ecologies of government data
mediation and usage
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How to locate these mediators? How to study them?

14. Thank you very much.
Sumandro Chattapadhyay
HasGeek Media LLP
The Sarai Programme, CSDS
www.ajantriks.net
@ajantriks