What Van Halen can teach us about data
On the day that the GDS registers are shut down, we reflect on the Government’s National Data Strategy and offer 5 suggestions for whatever comes next.
There’s an old story about Van Halen’s contract. Apparently they used to ask venues to provide a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed.
This wasn’t because the band were divas, had a rare form of kastanophobia (yes I googled for it) or wanted to flex their power over small town venues. The “M&M clause” was a tiny, tiny part of a huge contract that covered everything from the weight the stage could take, to the power requirements for the perm machines.
If the band walked into their dressing room to see some brown M&Ms, they knew the venue hadn’t been through the contract carefully, so everything else needed to be double checked. They used a trivial thing that they could see as soon as they arrived to prove the most complex parts of their contract had been completed.
This story — once again — shows that the open data world can learn a lot from glam rock, and naturally makes us think about The UK’s National Data Strategy (NDS).
Early last year we wrote a response to the consultation. We decided to take the David Lee Roth approach to consultations by focusing on the small things that might signal wider problems.
The focus of the NDS, rightly, is on the pyrotechnics and double-denim that is economic growth and innovation. There’s a decent set list including hits such as “more standards” and “interoperable data” and only the occasional “Geospatial Commission” B-side.
However, a look into the dressing room of government data will find a whole load of brown M&Ms.
At the time of writing the response, the GDS registers had been mostly abandoned. A local authority had been missing from one for almost two years, with no obvious error reporting mechanism, support agreement or understanding of what could be expected from the service.
It did have “data you can trust” printed in large friendly letters on the home page, though.
Today, GDS have given up on the registers product, and there are vague rumors that there is a replacement in the works.
We think the metric that the NDS should be judged by is the ability to deliver simple, reliable lists over the long term.
It should not be judged by new “innovative projects” that will spend half their money on trying to fix typos and inconsistencies in shoddy government data.
Publishing simple lists of data is the planking exercise of digital services. Most people can plank for a short time without any problem, but sticking it out in the long term is really hard.
With that in mind, we have some suggestions for future iterations of registers – or reliable simple lists – and we will be using them as a proxy – or M&M bowl – for the rest of data policy in government.
We hope these points will be taken into consideration for future data publishing efforts. We used the local authority registers in a lot of our projects and they almost worked excellently. We were sad that they contained errors for over two years before being scrapped, and we would be very keen on contributing to future attempts. Not least because it means we wouldn’t have to do it on our own.
Technology to data publishing should be what Euclidean geometry is to Photoshop – integral but not the end goal. The really hard bit about publishing reliable lists of data is making them reliable, not publishing them.
In most cases publishing small lists is a commodity technology. For versioning, use Git. To combine the two, use GitHub or another hosted Git. There is no point in reinventing the wheel here.
Rather, it’s better to spend time building tooling for maintainers. Any work done to bring data maintainers closer to the down-stream data users is worthwhile. The initial registers offering introduced named custodians. This is an excellent idea in practice, as it offers an appearance of accountability, but has a couple of problems.
