19.10.15
A commitment to transparency
Many organisations, particularly publicly accountable ones, say they favour transparency – and many take some steps towards it.
But data-dumps and a ‘Transparency’ page on your website aren’t enough. Information needs not just to be available – it needs to be accessible, searchable, indexable and capable of being ‘interrogated’, as the jargon has it.
Those to whom your organisation wants to open itself up need to know when new information will be made available, and exactly what is and is not within the scope of the transparency policy.
For that reason, Transport for London’s new transparency measures should be welcomed. These are the actions it has pledged to take:
- Publishing all replies to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests online. This will commence in 2016. The precise date will be announced by the end of the year;
- Publishing a schedule, which will set out when TfL will publish regular information and datasets. This will make it easier for stakeholders to plan their scrutiny of this material. The first schedule will be available in December 2015;
- Making webcasts of Board meetings available for longer than the current six month period, via TfL’s YouTube channel. This will start from December 2015 and will mean the recordings can still be viewed when they are no longer available on the Greater London Authority website;
- Reviewing how information is presented on TfL’s website. Work is already underway to make it easier to find and interpret the data published;
- Identifying any gaps in the information TfL publish about the number of customers using each service and standardising the presentation of this information. This will make it much simpler to understand the number of journeys made;
- Publishing an update twice a year on the progress made by TfL to further increasing transparency, including making more open data freely available.
This is an excellent and truly useful set of reforms that prove TfL has a genuine interest in transparency, rather than just paying lip-service to it.
Some other public organisations in rail, notably the Office of Rail & Road, are also doing well on transparency. Network Rail, after a strong start, could learn a lot from this list. Its own transparency pages do contain a wealth of published data, but it is scattergun, opaque and there is no schedule (or, sometimes, even any logic) as to what it updated and when.