Councils must not fear giving data to citizens: Palmerston exec

Far too many local-government organisations are hampering their ability to engage with citizens because they’re too scared to provide information which should rightly be in the public domain anyways, the head of community outreach at the City of Palmerston has warned.

Speaking at GTR’s recent Cloud Computing Forum 2013 conference, Ben Dornier, director of corporate and community services at the Northern Territory council, said councillors were often so nervous about sharing the wrong information with the public that they were swinging too far in the other direction.

As a result, much of the data managed by the council on a regular basis was not ending up in the hands of the public that it might benefit most. “We’re not exactly governing state secrets,” Dornier said.

“Disclosure of information can reasonably be expected to promote open discussion of public affairs and enhance government’s accountability. We’re not hiding a lot of things, and typically what we do hide fits into legislation – particularly with the very clear Information Privacy Principles and new Australian Privacy Principles coming out. These effectively govern what you cannot share.”

Some council staff, however, fear releasing the wrong information and, as a result, end up erring on the conservative side. When the data they’re holding back is broght into the spotlight, however, it’s often far from controversial – and would be of great usefulness to the general public.

Even information that is perceived to be confidential by some, must be assessed against objective measures to determine whether it can be effectively shared under the law.

“Embarrassment, discomfort or unwanted media attention towards elected members, as a whole or individually, or towards council as an organisation, are insufficient grounds for confidentiality of information,” Dornier said. “A big chunk of this information is supposed to be public already – and the reason the public doesn’t get it, or understand or analyse it, is because of us as an organisation.”

One of the more pressing issues for councils is not necessarily whether the public can get to public information, Dernier said, but whether councils have effective processes and procedures in place to preserve the integrity and security of confidential data.

In this respect, everyday issues such as staff turnover can be more problematic than perceived challenging trends such as the shift towards cloud applications, which are often maligned as being too insecure for council data. Palmerston and what he estimates to be 80% of NT councils are “already heavily, heavily engaged with the cloud” through use of current cloud-ERP systems – and yet many executives maintain a fear of cloud services as a home for data.

“I’ve had two complete changeovers of IT staff in 14 months in my role,” he explained, comparing the risk of that change to the risk from storing data in the cloud. “If I think about the risk that I’ve got from that – would all of the ratepayer data and private date be safer in the cloud, or safer in the hands of six people who have passwords to the system, and are no longer employed by the council? I have to consider where my actual risk is.”

Even where local councils are concerned about the integrity of data or hamstrung by the desire to offer more-detailed analysis of council information, it’s worth providing as much data to the public in raw form as possible, Dornier added, to allow them to make of it what they will.

“If you’re not capable of spending money on developing applications and providing it through different views, why not just give it away?” he said. “A lot of municipalities around the world are finding all citizens want is the data, and they will come up with the way to interpret it.”

“Just make sure the data is as real-time as you can make it, and true. You’ll be surprised at the amount of people who will consume it. Because local government doesn’t exist unless it can engage, and we do that very poorly, on a broad level. A lot of the information we have can be incredibly helpful to help us engage with our population.” – David Braue