WA Mandatory Open Data

No more decisions based on opinions and personal anecdotes. No more best-guess. The WA government is catching up with the world in making publicly-funded data open and accessible http://data.wa.gov.au  State policy is making it mandatory that Departments, Councils and other organisations make their information available, easy to find and mostly free. Here’s the policy http://www.data.wa.gov.au/open-data-policy

This is the best good news I’ve heard for a long time. For years we’ve been excluded, asked to submit requests, told it’s too difficult and so on. No more! Everything from development applications, waste management, managers’ credit card statements, river chemistry and land transactions to road statistics will be easy to access. We’ve called for open government. Here it comes.

The big benefits we can hope for are better decisions, new business opportunities, fresh research results, greater transparency and better trust between government and community. For sure, there will be some misuse of data and there will be some lousy interpretation of statistics. There will be embarrassing moments for managers and elected members. There will be Gotchas and Told-ya-so incidents. There will also be Eureka moments where researchers discover trends and connections that make our lives better.

An implication for public officers is the understanding that their work is no longer behind closed doors. The public demands and deserves open access to the whole river of data, not just selected drips of good news. Even failed projects will now be accessible and can provide useful input to new planning and new research. Experience around the world has shown that one really big effect of Open Data is the elimination of wasted actions and wasted money.

To move our State into the next phase of development we really need to know what we have been doing and to find new opportunities for progress. One of the first benefits is sure to be in the area of energy, finding waste and discovering opportunities for renewables.

Here are some huge open data sources already operating. Click and see the enormous scale and application of these facilities and ideas.

http://data.gov.au Australian Federal government

https://www.data.gov/ Entire USA federal government

http://data.gov.uk Whole of government, UK

http://open-data.europa.eu European Union

http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/ World Bank

One of our challenges will be to actually use the data, to abandon decisions and planning based on limited perception. Another challenge will to open the door, to let the information out and watch where it flies to. What are your thoughts?

Please contribute by clicking on Comments, below. Just log in as Name or Anonymous, or email me.

Why Building Restrictions Make Us Poor in Many Ways

We all want a village “feel” to our city and we like green, leafy suburbs. We want our family to live close by. We want housing to be affordable. We say so at every planning event. What we actually get is expensive, boring, concrete cubes for homes, shops and offices. Our families live in the outer suburbs. We feel constricted. Commuting is slower every month. Where do we go wrong?

Land, especially near city centres, has become very expensive. This rise in land prices is not because land is scarce in Australia; it’s just scarce in the places where we need it. Our low-rise homes and offices lock up the surface and the air space above them. The price of land has become a silent, non-productive tax on living and on doing business.

Building height and density restrictions deter growth in knowledge industries. Across the world we see that innovation thrives on the exchange of ideas when people live and work in well planned cities where people are close together. Lots of research shows a link between our skills base and the tendency to create new kinds of work. New job categories appear where there are more highly skilled workers. There is ample statistical evidence to show a link between population and productivity. Workers build knowledge faster in cities with lots of idea industries. People clustered together boost each other’s employment opportunities and potential income. We need more of this in WA to take us beyond mining.

It’s easy to see why we began imposing building restrictions. The crowded slums of the last two centuries showed how crime, disease, polluted air and filthy water reduced our quality of life. Such regulations expanded, bringing unintended consequences that limited our potential. We saw the shoulder to shoulder towers of New York and the featureless towers of the Gold Coast and didn’t like what we saw. What we got was short, squat office blocks and neighbourhoods without amenity; just heaps of plain offices here and houses without community there.

Looking to the future, if limits on height and density were relaxed less land would be needed to satisfy accommodation and commercial demand. This would take pressure off prices, meaning that we could allow more land for public space and our families could afford to buy a home. The greatest effect would be felt by those on low to middle income, whether they were buying or renting their homes. Thomas Piketty showed in “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” that house prices contribute to rising inequality.

The greatest effect of relaxing laws would be on boosting the whole economy. As worker productivity increases, the whole community benefits. This extends even to those not living in the effected near-city areas. At present many workers take jobs in lower-paying areas just because they can’t afford to live where the good work is located. Stamp Duty on house sales acts as a further disincentive to move to more productive locations. Labour allocates itself to low-productivity markets and the whole economy suffers.

Defining the problem is easy. Getting individual Councils to change planning schemes is the difficult bit. The results would benefit everybody. Rich land owners with a narrow self-interest are likely to be the chief opponents. Since the State Government would benefit by larger tax revenues from a growing economy they could move to compensate the affected nearby landowners on a reducing scale over a few years.

This is a big picture view for a better future. We can extend this theme to better transport, a cleaner environment and a stronger community. What are your thoughts?

Please contribute by clicking on Comments, below. Just log in as Name or Anonymous, or email me.

PERTH SKYSHOW: The best place to watch.

The best place to watch in 2015: further upriver than normal, further east, towards Burswood, due to construction work at Elizabeth Quay. The fireworks barges have been repositioned.

I visited preparations at South Perth today and met with the organiser, Peter Raoen. Key theme is more Fantasy. The water slides are spectacular. It's looking good for yet another "best ever" event.

Once again I’ll be volunteering and will have lots of photos for you.

[Later] Here’s a Facebook album of Australia Day 2015 and the wonderful volunteers http://is.gd/5MGQNE

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