For me there are two things. The first is that in terms of the transparency work the coalition government is taking forward, there's been a very strong focus on how the government spends its money and who's making decisions.
Also, interestingly, elements of how government has worked, even under freedom of information, have been hitherto quite hidden. So in terms of, for example, commitments about publishing the detail of contracts, not just information technology contracts but contracts across the board, when people have generally asked for those sorts of things under freedom of information, they've potentially been told that they can't be released because it's commercially sensitive information.
There's been a proactive decision to push government suppliers into making available contract information, which goes alongside spending information, which goes alongside potentially how a contractor is performing. The relationship between, if you like, government and its suppliers is being put into the public domain, really for the first time. That's very much part of the drive to a more efficient government.
Second, which I think is an important message and one that I would endorse from the witnesses who you've had from the United States, is that making available data does open new possibilities, in that we have computing power very cheaply available. This means that things that were once the province only of large corporations or organizations with significant capital, in terms of the ability to process large quantities of data and build applications on top of it, are now in the hands of the ordinary citizen. This is a transformative development.
One of the things that's interesting is that as the U.K. government has published more and more transparency data, it hasn't necessarily equated with the kinds of data that many of the external developers or many of the businesses would have put at the top of their lists.
The government has been very driven in terms of its priorities about making available data, about how it's spending money, for example. The external developer community and the business community are often more interested in geo-spatial data or transport data, data that they can really get their teeth into in terms of being able to create new products.
While the policy objectives are aligned, there's a difference of emphasis, depending on what kinds of points people are looking to try to demonstrate with the data that's being released and being made available.