Amelia Loye from engage2 explains how open data and “data from community” are important ways to help design services and policy. Amelia specialises in consultation and engagement for government, and has been helping manage engagement for the NZ and Australian open government national action plan.
In this podcast she speaks with David Pembroke about:
- the Open Government movement
- the expectation of transparency in today’s political climate
- making information more accessible to the public
- using creative treatments to engage
- reaching people “where they are”
- what skills are needed to reach citizens
- campaigns vs conversations
- how to get your management’s support
- data about community, and data from community
- distributing data to broader government
- building trust: change the conversation from consultation to participation
Listen to the podcast:
Selected Links:
Amelia Loye on open data:
“I think we’ve come a long way at discussing open data, data from community and how we can use that to make people more informed or make it more accessible and demonstrate transparency. We’ve still got, I believe, a long way to go when it comes to valuing data from citizens, and I’d like to see more systems in place to actually do that. I think of it quite simply. There’s data about community and some of that data comes from government, some of it comes from things like census, it might come from big data, data about community. But then there’s also data from community and I think that data has a lot more value than what we typically recognise and as I said, I think we need better systems and processes inside government to share that data around so that we’ve got a strong understanding of how a certain proposed change might affect a community, and also how we’re involving citizens in a meaningful way within the design and refinement of programme services and policies.”