Since the Conservative Liberal coalition replaced the Labour Party, as the UK Government party in power, there has been a question about how the Conservative’s approach to opening up public data would change the "Making Public Data Public initiative", and its influence upon data.gov.uk.

Advisers, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, were retained by the incoming administration, who also introduced Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety, as their man in this area. They also made some pronouncements about using open standards and openly publishing data, but there was not much initial detail behind this.

Last week saw the first meeting of the Public Sector Transparency Board, chaired by Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet office.  He was joined by these three advisers and Doctor Rufus Pollock, from Cambridge University, at the first meeting.

Their first task was to discuss new public data transparency principles, which have been reproduced in a post on the data.gov.uk blog.  These eleven draft public data principles go a long way to reflect the thinking of this group and how they intend to take forward the initiatives of their predecessors.

Key points that attracted my attention include:

• Release data quickly and then republished in linked data form later on–getting the data out there being the most important step in this process, formats being a secondary consideration.
• Public data will be available and easy to find through a single easy-to-use online access point–this access point being data.gov.uk.
• Data will be released under open licenses and in machine readable form, following World Wide Web Consortium recommendations and standards—linked data.

So, on the surface things don’t look that much different to what they did before the government changed—the commitment to publishing data in any format that was useful initially, and then a commitment to move towards making it machine-readable and linkable.

There does seem to be a drive to go further and deeper than their predecessors. Both from the point of view of publishing financial data, and anecdotal evidence of government departments being asked to discover all datasets that they, have that have not yet been published–a bit of a Donald Rumsfeld situation methinks.

Any concerns that changing the name of the initiative from Making Public Data Public, to the Transparency Agenda, would affect the progress of these initiatives seem, from these early draft principles, to be unfounded.  From my point of view  good for open data, good for Linked Data, good for data.gov.uk, good for UK government, and good for all of us.

Picture from Flickr by liber