No doubt the government’s push for more open data could drive innovation in private sector organisations, but it doesn’t come without its challenges. At the Australia 3.0 forum in Melbourne last week, a mixed group of IT professionals, government officials and heads of private companies came together to discuss how to address the main barriers preventing agencies and departments releasing more data to the public.
The elephant in the room when it comes to releasing government data is the expense of anonymising it. Departments such as human services, health and social services hold vast amounts of data but much of it is highly personal and sensitive, and costly to anonymise.
“It requires a degree of expertise, and not all agencies will have the skills to be able do that, so they might have to bring the skills in. Most agencies will not have the relevant skills to be able to understand how to anonymise the data in a sufficient, safe way to get it out there,” said Abul Rizvi, former deputy secretary, digital economy, Department of Communications. Continue>>>
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