Paul Geraghty sticks his neck out

The challenge: Linked Open Financial Data, put your council spend over £500 on the web by the end of the year.

It is really early days, but people are discussing what format that data should ideally be in when published. There is encouraging talk about which taxonomy should be used to describe payment types and of course the level of granularity which should ideally be produced.

In line with TBLs 5 star checklist, there are calls to JFDI, just get it out there and get yourself 1 Star.

Some brave councils have put some figures out some for honest and good reasons, others 'because they were told they got something for nothing', sigh.

There are h-activists doing amazing things with the bits of data dribbling out. It is all good stuff, and fascinating to watch unfold, and even I have chipped in here and there.

It is all gathering apace, and its all as you might expect - a bit of a free for all. I'm not knocking any of these tremendous efforts at all.

But I am taking the time to post a message - hey, Time Out!  Take a look at this idea.

Heres the situation:

It is 10 days now since Chris Taggart and Vicky Sargent published a report on lessons learned about publishing local open data for the Open Election Data Project.

I contract worked in Local Government for 10 years but still, I was pretty shocked by the no punches pulled tone and content of this report. I was pretty sickened and appalled to find out just how widespread this rot is.  I had sort of imagined I was just unlucky finding myself working in this type of environment.

Their report paints for me the all too familiar and glum picture of technological pygmies and naive decision makers falling for "throw money at it till it goes away" solutions. The tsunami of e-gov monies doled out over the years helped diminish in-house skills a long time ago, leaving many IT rooms in local government deviod of skills except how to put in support calls to system suppliers, or fiddle with a template in a CMS.

Honestly, you really need to read that report.  Go on, I'll wait.

Its not all councils - OK? Before you all look around for ropes and lamp-posts, there are individuals (and maybe some teams), in some councils who are have the where-with-all, political influence and skill capable of delivering top-notch results.  If you have any of these, then cherish them.

So, overall the situation is bad, right?

For me there is only one real answer (apologies if you heard me say this before)

Mandate the suppliers of financial software products to produce a 5 Star LOD (Linked Open Data) addition to their products by a reasonable time.

Starting NOW don't sign up for a Financial product without stipulating that you expect an open LOD stream with say 3 Stars minimum to be created from that backend system within a reasonable time frame.  Write it in the contract.

In tenders for Financial Products award 25% of the points for the ability of the supplier to deliver LOD.

If they try to charge you extra for that addition to their product threaten to cancel the contract.

I don't want to turn this into a tech post, but for the most part all you are asking for is a dump from their (your!) databases, formatted as a special kind of xml (OK, I'm dumbing this down slightly - the blueprint for the ideal format does not yet exist, as I described above).  If your supplier looks at you and says "RDF WTF?", sack them.

The need for Linked Open Financial Data is a technical problem for your IT suppliers - it is not a call for your HTML template author to go and buy a book on RDF.

5 Star Financial LOD has nothing to do with your council website CMS, unless you decide to stump for that nutty bastard kid of RDF, RDFa.

So - OK, suspend reality for a few minutes ... go along with me - now who are they, these suppliers?

Well, ahem, its pretty easy today, you go to something called the e-Gov Register (eGR) and you look them up.

Now this is where my knowledge of Financial IT systems lets me down, so forgive me and just get yourself on over to the eGR as long as it is still there of course and do a better job than me.

OK, it seems to me that of 450 or so local government organisations, 357 are listed as having a "Financials" supplier **. 

There are only 18 suppliers listed, and of those there are 6 Big Ones.

Between them the 6 Big Ones supply "Financials" to 326 Councils.

Can you say "competitive edge"?  How long do you think it would take the other 5 to catch up and reword their contracts and get programmers on the case.

You should think in terms of minutes rather than months.

Lets go further, lets say that it should be mandated that all new contracts with "Financials" suppliers include an LOD clause.

Perhaps Mr Pickles could dispatch someone to have a chat with one or two of these suppliers, or that he should have someone check that future contracts for Financial products being sold to Local Government all contain the necessary wording to make this happen?

So instead of trying to train and cajole 450 councils to FTP assorted CSV files into localdata.gov.uk (FFS) all the way through to grokking RDF, namespaces, LOD et al - why does the government not get on and make a strategy to bully and coerce 6 suppliers instead - and potentially get 326 councils teed up to produce useful LOD a bit sharpish?

Christ knows,  we pay them enough public money (reaches for his armchair auditor, now how much would that be then?).

That is my radical idea. Please drill holes in it if you feel the inclination.

If you find the eGR to be a fine thing and a good example of useful, publicly available open data which has been sitting there for about 6 years or more, and are wondering why it is not there now - then it has probably quietly slipped behind the SOCITM paywall and you should be angry with them about that, ** even though the top 6 suppliers may now be out of date.

Let them know in the comments on my blog, because if you try to add it to their "corrected" version of events on their blog it might get "mediated".  The appearance of some soc puppets would not surprise me in the least.