The South Australian premier, Jay Weatherill, has mandated a new requirement for all government agencies to house their public data in a central portal to ensure that it is accessible to the community at large.
Mr Weatherill also officially launched data.sa.gov.au – the website that will house government data – and extended a successful open data competition to an annual initiative.
“We want South Australia to be vibrant and innovative so we are opening up our data to industry, community groups, digital entrepreneurs and start-up companies,” said Mr Weatherill.
“This will create an enormous economic benefit to the state through the development of smartphone and web-based applications and will enable informed investment decision making.
“As the custodian of a significant amount of data, the State Government can help to fuel a boom in the local digital marketplace but it’s equally important that industry and community groups release their data too.”
The Office of the Chief Information Officer will lead an Open Data Action Plan. This will guide agencies in classifying, licensing and releasing their data, while ensuring that it maintains the highest standards of privacy, security, and integrity.
This year’s inaugural open data competition Unleashed demonstrated the benefits of providing government data to business and the community, with more than 100 digital entrepreneurs using government data to create new ideas, mobile applications, visualisation tools and websites.
Local company All my I.T. won the Premier’s Award for its web-based application concept Social Active which enables the public to meet up with people in their community for sports and recreation. It also allows users and organisations to host an activity and use social media to invite others to join them. All my IT also won the national prize for “Best Benefit to the SA Community”.
“Unleashed now will take place annually and I’m confident that even more digital entrepreneurs will use open data to create exciting new ways to benefit their community,” Mr Weatherill said.
As a result of Unleashed, there are now 229 usable open data sets published on www.data.sa.gov.au that have been provided by a number of state government agencies including the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure and the Attorney-General’s Department.
“We already have among the highest number of data sets openly licensed in Australia. Opening our data to all means that we can work together to design policy and projects that will benefit our citizens,” Mr Weatherill said.