Indonesia has had a Freedom of Information Act since 2008, but officials are still reluctant to release open data to the public, according to the government’s open data team.
The biggest challenge is to convince ministries and agencies that open data is good for them, Prasetya Dwicahya, Associate Director, Open Government Indonesia said.
Open data is still a “very new concept” in the country, said Khrisnaresa Adytia. In September this year, the government launched its open data portal. Officials are “afraid” that open data can expose “national secrets”, Dwicahya added, and this is a common sentiment among other governments, he believes.
Dwicahya admits that some sensitive data should not be made public - open data does not mean that every dataset should be released. “We don’t deal with national security data. The definition is quite clear”, he believes. “We only need public data which is classified and categorised under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Ministries had already been publishing data on their web sites, but not in re-usable formats. The team is now training officials to to convert the data to machine-readable formats like .csv and publish them on the open data portal.
As more agencies publish data on the portal, it can help foster economic growth in the country, the team believes. Entrepreneurs can use the data to build new services for Indonesians, while non-technology sectors can use the data to make better decisions, Dwicahya said.
Open Government Indonesia is taking small steps in publishing and advocating open data. It has started off with publishing population, budget and geospatial data because these will give “more benefits to people”. It is focusing on promoting open data among people with computer literacy and internet access, such as businesses and university students.
The new portal has features to help people use the data. Application programming interfaces or APIs allow developers to use data without having to download them onto their servers, speeding up the development of applications, Dwicahya said.
The team behind the open data portal took a waterfall approach, where it followed a fixed sequence of steps to develop the web site, but with a tweak. The team analysed requirements, designed, coded the web site and tested it - but then looped back to analyse new requirements that may have come up. The team had to satisfy the needs of all the ministries and there were too many requirements to fulfil through a purely agile approach, Arkka Dhiratara, Associate Director said.
Although the launch of the portal is a milestone for Indonesia, a tool is only as good as its user. The open government team’s most important task will be to help more officials to understand the value of open data and get more agencies on board.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futuregov, 11.12.2014
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