Reasons for not releasing data in government

We’re in the first workshop of the day at the CEBIT Gov 2.0 conference. It is led by Andrew Stott, the Director for Digital Engagement for the UK government.

The first exercise of the day has been to come up with reasons that government may give for not releasing data online. I don’t know if I’m happy or disappointed that our table did the best – coming up with 36 reasons (second was a table with 27).

I’ve listed them below – and added an additional set that Andrew says that he has also encountered in his role.

Note there are no value-judgements implied as to the validity of these reasons in specific cases.

Reasons for not releasing government data:

1. Costs too much
2. No business case
3. Has commercial value
4. It could breach privacy
5. It’s classified
6. It’s not ours and we don’t know whose it is
7. Unsure about quality
8. We don’t know where it is
9. It’s not our job
10. It’s not in a useful format
11. I’m not authorised
12. People will misuse it
13. The minister will lose reputation
14. It’s not ready yet
15. The department will lose reputation
16. Files are too large
17. We don’t have enough bandwidth
18. Thin edge of the wedge
19. Can find it but cannot access it
20. It is out of date / too old
21. We only have it on paper
22. We don’t know if we’re allowed to do it legally
23. Our Secretary says no
24. .
25. We don’t know why anyone would want it
26. Don’t see the value
27. Don’t have time / resources
28. They can FOI it
29. We’ll release it (but 90% redact it)
30. It is incomplete
31. It is incorrect
32. Commercially sensitive
33. Mosaic theory – could put it together with other
34. People would focus on the wrong things
35. It may cause unnecessary public discussion
36. We can’t confirm or deny we collect it

Here’s Andrew’s additional reasons:

• We know the data is wrong, and people will tell us where it is wrong, then we’d waste resources inputting the corrections people send us
• Our IT suppliers will charge us a fortune to do an ad hoc data extract
• Our website cannot hold files this large
• it’s not ours and we don’t have authorisation from the data owner
• We’ve already published the data (but it’s unfindable/unusable)
• People may download and cache the data and it will be out of date when they reuse it
• We don’t collect it regularly
• Too many people will want to download it, which will cause our servers to fail
• People would get upset

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This article originally appeared on eGov AU

Photo Credits: Flickr CC opensourceway