Data Sharing Issues: What Works and What Doesn’t

The following is a guest-post from national metadata advocate Lynda Wayne. In January, she put out a request to the NSGIC Community for input on her project to document "a set of practical measures to encourage/facilitate data sharing." This was part of an effort to assist to Dr. Tim De Troye and the Geospatial Administrators Association of South Carolina (GAASC) in developing the Process Framework for Developing Local Government Data Access Policies document (shared by Tim on this blog in January) and to add some "real world" content to a follow-up SC GIS conference presentation and discussion. Here is what she found out.

Issue: Variable Data Sharing Agreements
Data sharing agreements vary greatly in their complexity, effectiveness and requirements. When trying to share data among multiple organizations, managing differences and conflicts among agreements can be overwhelming.

What works:

• Handshakes making share Admin is on board
• Collaboratively developed, effective, standardized data sharing agreements

What doesn’t:

• Formal agreements because they typically include imprecise language that can serve as road blocks and add unnecessary overhead to the effort
• Over-involvement on the part of Administration and Legal personnel that leads to overly burdensome language in an effort to cover all the bases and possible scenarios

Issue: Missing or Out of Date Data Documentation
If data are not well-documented then they cannot be applied as fully or appropriately and competing/conflicting data sets can emerge.

What works:

• Providing metadata creation, review and management support in return for data access
• Support for a community-wide metadata training and support organization/resource

What doesn’t:

• Trying to create metadata by guessing at how the data were created

Issue: Maintaining Personal Privacy and Public Safety
Data developers have an obligation to protect the privacy and safety of their constituents.

What works:

• Utilizing the FGDC Guidelines (PDF) as to what data should be shared
• Utilize available standards (e.g. URISA/FGDC Addressing standard) that address privacy and security issues
• Generalizing data such that non-sensitive content is still available
• Public Record Laws and ‘policies from above’ that explicitly include geospatial data and establish clear guidelines as to who can access the data and how to request access
• Recognizing that very little data is truly ‘sensitive’

What doesn’t:

• Wholesale approaches that eliminate sharing of all ‘potentially’ sensitive data
• Over-involvement on the part of Administration and Legal personnel that attempt to cover all the bases

Issue: Maintaining Control of the Data
Data, like any resources, is subject to personal, professional and/or political control issues.

What works:

• Earnest dialog to identify precise concerns and brainstorm on innovative solutions
• Naming conventions and data lineage guidelines such as those published by the Louisiana Data Council (PDF)
• Data management models that allow the use of data that is maintained in your system
• Data steward / trusted source models

What doesn’t:

• Treating public data as a private resource

Issue: Data Misuse and Exploitation
Once data is in the hands of others in can be inappropriately applied or resold for profit.
What works:

• Metadata, metadata, metadata that includes valid ‘Use Constraints’, ‘Distribution Liability’ and ‘Purpose’ statements
• Clear, not ‘legalese’, explanation of license/copyright requirements and mandatory acknowledgement by the consumer
• Making data freely accessible so that consumers easily use current version rather than trying to milk the older data

What doesn’t:

• Stifling the use of data in new and innovative ways – if somebody makes a product somebody else is willing to pay for that drives the economy and enterprise.

Issue: Reduced Capacity and Infrastructure to Support Data Serving and Exchange
Most organizations have a mission to serve their own constituents and are staffed/resourced specifically to that mission.

What works:

• Money - especially if designated to build and maintain data sharing capacity – new data collection, hardware, software, training
• A simplified process that adds no burden to the data provider
• Documenting the return on investment that data sharing can yield to warrant capacity building

What doesn’t:

• One time payments for data that are not targeted to capacity growth

What say you, gentle readers? Feel free to add any thoughts in the comments section.

South Carolina Publishes a Guide to Developing Data Access Policies

Editor's Note: The following is a guest-post from Dr. Timothy M. De Troye, GISP, South Carolina State GIS Coordinator and member of the NSGIC Board of Directors.

The Geospatial Administrators Association of South Carolina has published a guide to help local governments, as well as all other levels of government and the private sector, develop and implement GIS data access policies.

The guide -- A Process Framework for Developing Local Government Data Access Policies (PDF) -- grew out of discussions at the 2009 South Carolina statewide GIS conference. An informal poll discovered that some GIS organizations did not have a GIS data access policy, while others had a rudimentary policy, but almost no organization had a formalized approach in developing such policies. that led to a project focused on data access, data distribution and permitted uses that resulted in the creation of a guide to help GIS departments to step through the thought process on developing a policy.

The guide takes into account key stakeholder personnel, different types of data, and different approaches to managing that data. Contributions to the document came from multiple organizations and levels of government including municipal, county, state, and federal agencies as well as from a utility. While the document is written with the local organization in mind, it is applicable to different levels of government and can be used as a vehicle for policy development within the private sector.

From the Overview:

In many organizations, the GIS manager has been charged with establishing GIS data access policy for the organization without the official authority to do so and without understanding the implications associated with policy implementation. Often, the result is a policy that is not formally adopted or a policy that has been established strictly from a legal perspective.

The document serves as a process framework for developing an effective GIS data access policy. GIS managers can use this framework to help decision makers understand and formulate a GIS data access policy for their entire organization. The process encourages decision makers to review options for data distribution and carefully consider how implementing a policy will impact the organization, staff, private citizens, the business community, and other government
agencies.

The goal is to enlighten and inform decision makers about specific GIS data access policy decisions. The goal is not for all government organizations to have the same policies, but for each organization to formulate policies using an informed and well thought out process.

The document outlines a series of data access policy components that should be considered during policy development. Information about the components, suggested participants, and potential implications are presented for each. Readers are encouraged to utilize these components as a framework for policy development and to expand the content as needed to address the specific concerns of their organization.

To help facilitate understanding and discussion, the document is written from the perspective of a non-GIS practitioner. This is the product of a collaborative effort among members of the Geospatial Administrators Association of South Carolina (GAASC).

Here's an Interesting Idea

Robert Kosara, at Eager Eyes, suggests that there might be a role for a "National Data Agency" to enable the government openness that is now being discussed.

This agency would be tasked with collecting data that all other agencies collect and produce, and making it available in a central place and in electronic, machine-readable form. There could and should be a reasonable data presentation on its website, perhaps even a National Data Dashboard (showing data of interest like debt, spending, jobless rate, etc.). But the bulk of data analysis would be left to third parties: analysts, journalists, citizens (and also aliens like me). Easily available data would make for more insightful reporting, more informed decisions, and endless business opportunities.

This suggestion will undoubtedly spark concerns about growing government, creating more bureaucracies, etc. But what I find most interesting about it are the possible outcomes it envisions and the culture of open data sharing that it describes.