Andrew McKenna-Foster and Kathleen Sullivan - Complicated Problem of Closing Open Data
Channel: csvconf
Date: 31/05/2020

Open government data portals can be a valuable source of diverse public-sector information, from lobbyist spending to water quality test results. They also have a lot of aging junk: little-used datasets with cryptic titles and scant documentation. The library domain has years of experience “weeding” out under-used or outdated materials, and our team brought that perspective to the Washington State open data portal (data.wa.gov/browse). But weeding open data turned out to be pretty complicated. What counts as “low quality” or “little” use? Who makes the weeding decision, in a publishing environment that’s usually decentralized and managed anonymously? How do portals, created for transparency, remove content in a transparent way? We examined nearly all U.S. state and many U.S. city government portals and found very few formal data removal policies -- a void that raises questions about authority, usability and management, as many civic data portals enter their second decade. Supported by the Open Data Literacy project (https://odl.ischool.uw.edu/), this work is contributing to a new open data curation partnership between the Washington State Library and the state’s data portal. The talk will cover our findings, recommendations from archivists and other public records experts, and how the Washington State Library and state agencies are working together to improve open data resources for the public.

--
csv,conf,v5 is a community conference for data makers everywhere, featuring stories about data sharing and data analysis from science, journalism, government, and open source.  Held May 13-14, 2020, Online. https://csvconf.com/