I have never earned a living in journalism, but I consider myself a journalist. And while I have no business meddling with servers or code, I also consider myself a geek.
Where these two avocations intersect is in the world of open data.
The term “open data” didn’t exist until 1995 and didn’t become a government concern until 2007. But access to government records and information has been a democratic principle for more than half a century.
Like many University of Hawaii journalism school graduates, I fell in love with public records thanks to professor Bev Keever, a world-class journalist and educator.
I followed her assignments into the musty back corners of government offices. It was the unglamorous side of journalism: the hard work of compiling records and building a narrative.
Today I’m still a little nostalgic about those microfiche machines. But even then the geek in me knew there had to be a better way.
When requesting information at a government office, I’d watch an employee retype what I wrote on a paper slip into a computer to print it out, then charge me $7 for the task. Why not put that computer on this side of the counter?
By 2010, open data was a global movement, and I launched a wiki called the Hawaii Open Data Project. The idea was simple: I made the same government data requests that local media made, but then published the results freely for anyone to review.
The next year, I co-founded the nonprofit Hawaii Open Data, which more formally advocated the open-data movement in the islands.
The principles were clear: Access to government information is needed to uphold principles of accountability and transparency. More than that, access to civic datasets supports data-driven public policies, the development of innovative community tools and even the creation of new businesses or projects based on novel uses of the data.
Hawaii Information Service, where I worked for 15 years, is such a business.
But open-data advocates often find themselves at odds with other perfectly reasonable government priorities: operations, security and privacy.
Hawaii has a chief information officer, but his job is mainly to keep existing systems running — and upgrade legacy systems that are half a century old.
Hawaii also has a chief information security officer, a good friend of mine. But he must “protect and preserve the confidentiality, integrity and availability of electronic information resources.”
There should be someone focused on making public information public. What good is an open-data law if there are no resources to execute it?
The role of chief data officer is common in business, CIO Magazine summarizing the role as “a leader who creates business value from data.”
And CDOs are also increasingly common in government; more than half of U.S. states have one.
Hawaii is poised to join their ranks under House Bill 1885, which would create a chief data officer and a data task force to facilitate data sharing across state agencies and with the public.
“It is in the State’s interest to increase access to data maintained by and available from state agencies as such data can inform public policy, stimulate innovation within and outside government, encourage public engagement, and enhance transparency,” the bill begins. “This data can also spur economic development and produce new and innovative resources and services that benefit state employees, individual citizens, and businesses.”
The state Office of Information Practices, an agency tasked with most of the hard work in ensuring state agencies comply with public-record laws, testified in support of the bill, saying it “would help increase the availability of data held by state agencies both to the public at large and to other agencies.”
The CDO bill, HB 1885, cleared its required House hearings Thursday and kicked off its journey in the Senate on Friday. If passed and signed into law, Hawaii will retain its place among the most forward-thinking states when it comes to open data.
Finally, a quick update in closing: The cryptocurrency bill I wrote about in my last column Opens in a new tab, SB 3025, is also beginning its journey in the Senate. Public testimony is critical to its passage.
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Ryan Kawailani Ozawa is founder of Hawaii Hui LLC, focused on online community and collaboration. Join his open tech chat channel at HawaiiSlack.com Opens in a new tab.
