Post: 16 July 2013
Executive Summary:
The Register of Charities is going to be released as bulk open data. Yay!
But … some peeps in the charitable sector are offended because the Cabinet Office used the announcement of this data release to talk trash about them.
They kinda have a point. Not helpful, Cabinet Office.
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Yesterday Cathy Pharoah published a post on the Third Sector website urging the UK’s civil society organisations to embrace open data and promote open access to information. Pharoah is co-director of the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at Cass Business School, and an expert on charitable funding. Her support is certainly a welcome contribution to the discussion around the benefits of open data to the voluntary sector.
However Pharoah also has some words of caution: organisations should be aware that some want to use open data “as a stick to beat the sector with”. She refers to a “recent Government announcement that its new public database would ‘open the lid’ on charity finances”, and sees this as an illustration of “the tensions underlying the open-data process - it is being projected as both an opportunity and a threat.”
Pharoah is following up on comments last month from Jane Tully, head of policy at the Charity Finance Group. Speaking at the launch of a report on accountability and transparency, Tully criticised the same Government announcement as “opportunistic and inappropriate” in tone and said it had “upset some of the sector”.
The announcement in question was a Cabinet Office “news story” released alongside the Government’s response to the Shakespeare Review. It highlighted a plan to make data from the Charity Commission’s Register of Charities freely available as open data by the end of March 2014.
This announcement should have been unalloyed good news. Making the Register data more accessible could have been presented in a straightforward manner as a modest but useful addition to the Government’s open data programme.
Instead the Cabinet Office tried to make some political hay out of the announcement. The Charity Commission’s Register holds a wide range of information on individual charities and what they do. However the Cabinet Office chose to focus entirely on the financial details, constructing a tedious but familiar narrative about funding, expenditure and the need for public scrutiny.
Worse, the announcement made selective use of figures from a 2012 Ipsos MORI survey to give the impression that lack of transparency on financial information was responsible for widespread mistrust of charities.
Circulation of this “news story” in the specialist media mostly followed the Cabinet Office’s slant. One IT news website led with this:
“Charities are to open up their accounts and provide data on what they earn and how they spend their money in a bid by government to make them more transparent.”
It was left to the NCVO blog to explain the announcement properly, by filling in the facts that the Cabinet Office had left out. Information in the Register of Charities is already available to the public on the Charity Commission’s website. The open data release planned for next year is about making that information more accessible for bulk re-use by developers and analysts, not about any additional disclosure of information by charities themselves.
It would be nice to think that this is just an example of bad comms from the Cabinet Office’s Transparency Team. Or that Pharoah, Tully and others in the charitable sector who have taken umbrage at the tone of the announcement are just thin-skinned. After all, open data is a new concept for many in the sector; there are bound to be a few misunderstandings and ruffled feathers. Long-term observers of the Government’s transparency policy expect a certain amount of spin and bloviation, and know when to ignore it.
However I must admit to some irritation myself at the way the Cabinet Office has handled this. Last year I had a small role in the process that led to the Cabinet Office announcement, when I submitted an unlocking request for release of the Register of Charities. Looking back at that request, I am struck by how little common ground there is between the content of the Cabinet Office announcement and the arguments I made for release of the data:
Benefits of making the bulk data more widely available are likely to be primarily social. The data can be analysed to gauge the accessibility of third sector services and whether they are adequately funded to meet community needs. This is an existing area of research, but unlocking the data will promote wider engagement in that effort. Subsets of the Register data can be incorporated into web services and apps to direct potential service users toward charities operating in their local areas. Making the bulk data available directly from the Charity Commission will encourage development of functionality addition to that currently available from the Charity Commission and OpenCharities websites.
My thinking was simply that bulk release of the data might make it easier to connect charities to service users and match the distribution of funding to practical needs. This idea that the data release will promote more public scrutiny of charitable finances seems rather fanciful, frankly.
In my view the Register of Charities is a fairly important reference dataset that should, as a matter of principle, be available for broad re-use under the Open Government Licence. The bulk data is already available indirectly via the Open Charities website, but subject to a “share-alike” restriction. I made the unlocking request after finding that the Charity Commission was resisting further release of the Register as bulk data.
I was obviously pleased to hear that the Register of Charities dataset would finally be released as open data. However the only criticism implied in my data request was of the Charity Commission. So I was disappointed to see that the Cabinet Office had taken this news as an opportunity to impugn the financial transparency of the charitable sector itself (without, as far as I can see, any real evidence).
Is Pharoah correct to be concerned that open data could be used against the charitable sector as “a stick for beating organisations or their beneficiaries”? In light of the Cabinet Office’s rhetoric it is difficult to argue against that interpretation.