I was really hoping we were going to go in reverse order for once.
I don't know whether this takes us out of the pack. This is going to be boring and technical, but the danger we have with open data right now is the thing we're tacking on at the end of the process. You have a government that creates data, analyzes it, does interesting things, and then at the very end we tack this thing on saying, by the way, you have to make it public with the rest of the world.
As a result, our open data initiative has a compliance problem. It's something ministries do.... It's rather like access to information: they don't really want to be doing it. They have to be doing it because the government has asked, but it doesn't actually support a business need right now at the ministry.
My argument would be that if you want to be a genuine leader and want to be thinking about what a government looks like in the 21st century, you have to stop thinking about the data as being an end product that sits at the top or at the end of the process, but rather as being core infrastructure for running government and as the platform upon which all good decisions and all government rests.
I talk about the term “dogfooding", which is when you use your own materials. You don't just publish data and hope other people are going to use it; you dogfood it: you create it and then you build your own infrastructure on top of it.
If we expect industry to be using government data, they're only going to start using it and really believing that we're committed to it when we're using it as well and build our own infrastructure on it.
So the number one thing I would do is go from here to there.