Holding Companies to Account – OUseful.Info, the blog…

Using Open Data to Hold Companies to Account – Total Receipts Over £25,000?

In Holding Companies to Account – Open Data Consolidation, I noted a couple of different ways in which we could use opendata to consolidate something of what we know about companies that provide services to or on behalf of public bodies, or otherwise receive monies from public services:

1) structural consolidation, in the sense of identifying companies that are part of the same corporate group;
2) financial consolidation, in the sense of identifying spend made to the same company from across different public bodies, and/or spend to different companies from the same corporate group from one or more public bodies.

In respect of the second notion, see also Open Data, Transparency, Fan-In and Fan-Out which describes how we can also start to consolidate connections and payments made between public bodies (also Public Sector Transparency – Do We Need Open Receipts Data as Well as Open Spending Data?).

I’ve previously doodled thoughts on whether there is a need for companies receiving public money to disclose those receipts (eg Spending & Receipts Transparency as a Consequence of Accepting Public Money?) – but whilst they may have no obligation to do so, the availability of open transactions data (and increasingly, open contracts data (eg The Local Government (Transparency) (Descriptions of Information) (England) Order 2014, h/t @owenboswarva) means that we can start to aggregate and publish this information, on their behalf, as part of a corporate watch activity:-)

So here’s a what if… What if there was a way we could set up “open public data reflector” sites that would aggregate data about a particular company or corporate group, aggregate it, and reflect it back? As a start, we could simply flip requirements put onto public bodies (eg publication of spend over £25,000 for large departments or services) to complementary views on the private corporate side (publication of all receipts over £25,000 from large public bodies, publication of summed receipts over £25,000 from local councils (who have a lower spending amount disclosure threshold). Of course, in the latter case, we’d need to aggregate the smaller amounts in order to calculate the sums.) By aggregating contract information, (additional) spend against contracts could also be tracked.

In this respect, I could imagine someone like SpendNetwork setting up a white label site that would allow civil society activists to fire up a ‘corporate watch’ website that reflects back open public data that refers to a particular company (something a little more sophisticated than their current raw data listings). If they made their data a little easier to access, I may be tempted to play with it…

Alongside the open public data reflector, it might be useful to have a “what do they know about you?” reflector that describes the sort of information the company holds about you that could be accessed via a Data Protection Act subject access request. (I’m not sure how we could find that out? Get several people to put requests in, extract the field names/metadata elements and publish those?) Thinks: wouldn’t it be nice if there was a request that could be made of data-controllers that forced them to disclose the fields and descriptive metadata for any data that would inspect when putting together a subject access request response?!;-) A “meta” subject access request, in other words?

PS Examples of outputs relating to aggregated spend with particular companies:

Centre for Entrepreneurs/Spend Network report: Spend Small – Local Authority Spend Index.

If you know of any more, please let me have a link via the comments.

School Chain Locks Out Public Service Values?

An article in the Observer declares Academy chain accused of ‘privatisation by stealth’ over plan to outsource jobs, a report on how the Academy Enterprise Trust (AET) has “selected” PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to partner with it in establishing an LLP “to take over responsibility for providing school business managers, IT staff, secretarial staff, and finanicial expertise, along with speech and language therapy provision, education psychology, education welfare, curriculum development and professional development”.

Here’s a quick chart of academy groupings with at least 15 academies in the group:

As you might expect, when talking about their performance, the group in part assumes you must be referring to their financial rather than just educational performance:

(By the by, they really need to talk to their webteam about the domain mapping…)

As well as outsourcing everything, it looks like the AET is of a size where they can start raking it in as a provider of teacher training courses:

(I don’t know if this means they can use their own academies for placements, getting cheap labour and perhaps a training grant bung, as well as the more general student fees, for each placement?)

School Direct places are offered by the AET National Teaching School Alliance in partnership with an good or outstanding Ofsted accredited teacher training provider.

You will spend the majority of your training in the classroom, building your confidence in an academy environment whilst receiving excellent mentoring support.
You will complete placements in academies who are experienced in initial teacher training and who excel at training and developing their staff.
All School Direct places will lead to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). In addition, some providers also accredit a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE)

Participating AET academies recruit and select their own trainees with the expectation that they will then go on to work within the Academies Enterprise Trust, although there is no absolute guarantee of employment.

You may apply directly to the Academies Enterprise Trust National Teaching School Alliance or directly to the AET academy that you wish to be trained in or contact the AET National Teaching School Alliance.

Scale-up, plug-in, live-off public money and private student debt, partner with “trusted auditors” to disburse funds to private providers (because they previously got rumbled when making disbursements to themselves…?) – is that how it works?

By the by, the following schools are part of the AET group:

– primary: Westerings Primary Academy (Rayleigh and Wickford), Plumberow Primary School (Rayleigh and Wickford), Ashingdon School (Rayleigh and Wickford), Weston Academy (Isle of Wight), Hamford Primary Academy (Clacton), Oaks Academy (Faversham and Mid Kent), St James the Great Academy (Tonbridge and Malling), Tree Tops Academy (Faversham and Mid Kent), Langer Primary Academy (Suffolk Coastal), Molehill Copse Primary School (Faversham and Mid Kent), Percy Shurmer Academy (Birmingham, Hall Green), Brockworth Primary Academy (Tewkesbury), Offa’s Mead Academy (Forest of Dean), Severn View Academy (Stroud), Noel Park Primary School (Hornsey and Wood Green), Trinity Primary Academy (Hornsey and Wood Green), Hall Road Academy (Kingston upon Hull North), Newington Academy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle), The Green Way Academy (Kingston upon Hull North), Charles Warren Academy (Milton Keynes South), Barton Hill Academy (Torbay), North Ormesby Primary Academy (Middlesbrough), Montgomery Primary Academy (Birmingham, Hall Green), Feversham Primary Academy (Bradford East), Shafton Primary Academy (Barnsley East), St Helen’s Primary School (Barnsley Central), Lea Forest Academy (Birmingham, Hodge Hill), Cottingley Primary Academy (Leeds Central), Beacon Academy (Loughborough), Anglesey Primary Academy (Burton), Four Dwellings Primary Academy (Birmingham, Edgbaston), Caldicotes Primary Academy (Middlesbrough), Meadstead Primary Academy (Barnsley Central), Hazelwood Academy (South Swindon), North Thoresby Primary School (Louth and Horncastle), The Utterby Primary School (Louth and Horncastle);
– secondary: Unity City Academy (Middlesbrough), New Rickstones Academy (Witham), Greensward Academy (Rayleigh and Wickford), Maltings Academy (Witham), Clacton Coastal Academy (Clacton), Aylward Academy (Edmonton), Nightingale Academy (Edmonton), Richmond Park Academy (Richmond Park), Tendring Technology College (Clacton), Bexleyheath Academy (Bexleyheath and Crayford), Everest Community Academy (Basingstoke), Ryde Academy (Isle of Wight), Sandown Bay Academy (Isle of Wight), East Point Academy (Waveney), Felixstowe Academy (Suffolk Coastal), Millbrook Academy (Tewkesbury), The Duston School (South Northamptonshire), The Rawlett School (An Aet Academy) (Tamworth), The New Forest Academy (New Forest East), Childwall Sports & Science Academy (Liverpool, Wavertree), Sir Herbert Leon Academy (Milton Keynes South), Tamworth Enterprise College and AET Academy (Tamworth), Winton Community Academy (North West Hampshire), Broadlands Academy (North East Somerset), Greenwood Academy (Birmingham, Erdington), Cordeaux Academy (Louth and Horncastle), Four Dwellings Academy (Birmingham, Edgbaston), Kingsley Academy (Brentford and Isleworth), Kingswood Academy (Kingston upon Hull North), Swallow Hill Community College (Leeds West), Firth Park Academy (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough), Hillsview Academy (Redcar);
– special: Columbus School and College (Chelmsford), The Pioneer School (Basildon and Billericay), Wishmore Cross Academy (Surrey Heath), Greenfield Academy (Stroud), Peak Academy (Stroud), The Ridge Academy (Cheltenham), Newlands School (Camberwell and Peckham).

Tracking Group Growth in Privately Operated Public Services – Fragments

Just doodling, looking for sources of data to try to map out the evolution of corporate groups that are taking over the operation of public services (another few possible pieces in the holding companies to account jigsaw…)

Health and Social Care

The CQC publishes a spreadsheet detailing all the locations it inspects which includes a group/brand identifier that allows us to track individual companies that operate as part of a group or under a common brand [CQC data].

Justice and detention

I haven’t found a nice dataset that identifies the operators of prison and detention facilities. The Ministry of Justice publish Prison and probation trusts performance statistics that includes management information detailing the names of prisons and trusts, but not their operators. There is an unstructured list of contracted out prison operators but no data file? I can’t find a list of operators of immigration removal/detention centres? (Serco, GEO and MITIE may all be operators?)

SLAs and general contract details here – MOJ – Prison Service level agreements and contracts – though no mention of private contractor names? Other possible sources: inspection reports from HM Inspectorate of Prisons. Reports are presented as PDF documents, and appear to include a fact page that includes a statement of Escort contractors, Health service providers and Learning and skills providers. I haven’t found a simple datafile that clearly states the providers of these service types by prison?

As far as probation service delivery goes, I’m not sure what sort of private contracts the probation trusts operate – one way in might be to trawl through the spending data (eg Probation trusts spend over £25,000 (note: that page says “We do not publish everything and HMT lists transactions not to be included in their guidance on data inclusions and redactions” although no link is given to that guidance document…).

UPDATE: FOI Release: Home Office immigration enforcement contracts

Academies

The Department for Education publishes a spreadsheet detailing Open academies and academy projects in development that includes the name of the sponsoring organisation.

Housing

The Homes and Communities Agency publish results from “an annual online survey completed by all English private registered providers of social housing (PRPs)” – Statistical Data Return (SDR) (see particularly the statistical return full data sheet; amongst other things, this document includes a sheet that associates subsidiary companies with their parent housing trusts).

PFI

I don’t really know much about PFI (I don’t really know much about anything linked to in this post!) except that PFI contracts often have large numbers of 000s associated with them. Private Finance Initiative Projects summary data is perhaps one quick way into to exploring that whole can of worms further?

What Else?

So what other areas, and what other data sources, am I missing?

PS writing about a collaboration between OpenOil and OpenCorporates to map the structure of the BP corporate sprawl, Glyn Moody notes the realisation by OpenOil that “[t]he entire play in the way multinationals operate is in the interplay between the group as a co-ordinated whole…”:

…[T]his unified strategy is played out across over a thousand affiliate companies who each exist as a separate legal “person”. The company naturally seeks to maximise advantage across jurisdictions by combining these different legal persons in the most profitable and least liable way for any given business problem. But even if the group does act with one mind, the price of being able to maintain the affiliate structure as separate legal persons is a bare minimum of autonomous reporting by each of them.

It was as if the … group is a superorganism and its affiliates were the constituent organisms included in the whole, like individual ants or coral. None of those companies had any purpose or would even survive without being integrated into the colony. Nevertheless, each of them has a unique footprint and what we were doing was studying the traces of their uniqueness, their “genetic code”, to see if significant information was stored there which could tell us something about the internal functioning of the colony.

As soon as you start working with data in networked model (where you look for links and relationships that can aggregate data from multiple sources) you soon realise that apparently meaningful or coherent gross level patterns or structures can emerge from the simple interactions and behaviours of individual components. (Supervenience is the term used to describe how the properties of the higher level are derived from (or supervene on) the lower level properties or behaviours. However, in the case of a corporate netwrok, we might image that a goal state created at the higher level by actors with a view over the whole system is what is actually driving the behaviour of subservient lower level actors. An ecological view of the corporate network might look to elements of downward causation to try to explain the behaviour of the lower level parts.)

PPS It’s probably 20 years since I last read heavily, and thought a lot about, parts, whole, levels, supervenience and emergence. And I seem to have forgotten most of it:-( I wonder if the box loads of photocopied papers are still “archived” in my office somewhere… Hmmm…

Holding Companies to Account – Open Data Consolidation

According to Wikipedia:

In business, consolidation or amalgamation is the merger and acquisition of many smaller companies into much larger ones. In the context of financial accounting, consolidation refers to the aggregation of financial statements of a group company as consolidated financial statements.

I’ve been pondering the use of open data for holding companies to account again (see also here and here, for example) and a couple of ways forward seem to be crystallising out for me, at least in the way(s) I’ve been hacking some data sketches around. These ways loosely map on to the two senses of consolidation described above, I think?

In the first case, using open data sources to map out corporate groupings, or look at how companies start to consolidate into corporate groupings. The OpenCorporates folk are looking at doing this properly – based on share ownership of one company by another – but I’m looking for other signals and sources of data that allow us to associate company names within a wider corporate sprawl. For example, CQC data lists all the locations inspected by that body, along with the group or brand name (if any) under which a particular location operates. We can then use this information to identify all the locations associated with a particular brand or group.

Whilst doing this in the context of sponsoring organisations for school academies, it struck me that once several independent locations have been established or aggregated together as part of a group, if those groups are driven by “growth” strategies, we will presumably start to see merger and acquisition behaviours? [See also other possible courses of action that larger groupings may take: School Chain Locks Out Public Service Values?.] By using open data sources, we may be able to track the first – and then possibly second – phase of this sort of consolidating activity?

In the second case, part of the rationale for identifying corporate groupings is so that we can start to consolidate information about payments made to, and quality or evaluation reports relating to, the members of a particular group. That is, we can start to think about a form of consolidated accounting. For example, we can start to total up all the payments made by the public sector (across both national and local government) to a particular corporate grouping, possibly across several spending areas; or we can look at the quality reports relating to different contracts raised by a particular corporate group as a whole and make a judgement about the service levels delivered by that operator in general. This consolidated quality and/or financial reporting also provides us with a way of looking at the gross behaviour of a company grouping, and comparing it, in accountability terms, with national public services, for example.

I’ve long since been confused about what open data may or may not be good for in accountability or transparency terms, but now I feel as if it’s starting to make sense to me: as a way of shining some light onto the behaviour of private companies operating in the public sector, and also as a way of demonstrating just how much public money is sunk into some of them compared to finding made available to public bodies, for example.

If we could also get tax positions of companies and corporate groups more clearly illuminated as accessible data sources, along with information about their employment and payment practices (so we could, for example, run models on the extent to which the state is also likely to subsidise these companies’ operations through tax, housing and welfare benefits/payments made to their employees compared to those made to public sector employees), we could start to get a better idea about the way public money is actually being spent system wide?

Using Open Public Data to Hold Companies to Account

I’ve been in a ranty mood all day today, so to finish it off, here are some thoughts about how we can start to use #opendata to hold companies to account. The trigger was finding a dataset released by the Care Quality COmmission (CQC) listing the locations of premises registered with the CQC, and the operating companies of those locations (early observations on that data here).

The information is useful because it provides a way of generating aggregated lists of companies that are part of the same corporate group (for example, locations operated by Virgin Care companies, or companies operated by Care UK). When we have these aggregation lists, it means we can start to run the numbers across all the companies in a corporate group, and get some data back about how the companies that are part of a group are operating in general. The aggregated lists thus provide a basis for looking at the gross behaviour of a particular company. We can then start to run league tables against these companies (folk love league tables, right? At least, they do when it comes to public sector bashing). So we can start to see how the corporate groupings compare against each other, and perhaps also against public providers. Of course, there is a chance that the private groups will be shown to be performing better than public sector bodies, but that could be a useful basis for a productive conversation about why…

So what sorts of aggregate lists can we start to construct? The CQC data allows us to get lists of locations associated with various sorts of care delivery (care home, GP services, dentistry, more specialist services) and identify locations that are part of the same corporate group. For example, I notice that filtering the CQC data to care homes, the following are significant operators (the number relates to the number of locations they operate):

Voyage 1 Limited                          273
HC-One Limited                            169
Barchester Healthcare Homes Limited       168

When it comes to “brands”, we have the following multiple operators:

BRAND Four Seasons Group                   346
BRAND Voyage                               279
BRAND BUPA Group                           246
BRAND Priory Group                         183
BRAND HC-One Limited                       169
BRAND Barchester Healthcare                168
BRAND Care UK                              130
BRAND Caretech Community Services          118

For these operators, we could start to scrape their most recent CQC reports and build up a picture of how well the group as a whole is operating. In the same way that “armchair auditors” (whatever they are?!) are supposed to be able to hold local councils to account, perhaps they can do the same for companies, and give the directors a helping hand… (I would love to see open data activists buying a share and going along to a company shareholder meeting to give some opendata powered grief ;-)

Other public quality data sites provide us with hints at ways of generating additional aggregations. For example, from the Food Standards Agency, we can search on ‘McDonalds’ as a restaurant to bootstrap a search into premises operated by that company (although we’d probably also need to add in searches across takeaways, and perhaps also look for things like ‘McDonalds Ltd” to catch more of them?).

Note – the CQC data provides a possible steer here for how other data sets might be usefully extended in terms of the data they make available. For example, having a field for “operating company” or “brand” would make for more effective searches across branded or operated food establishments. Having company number (for limited companies and LLPs etc) provided would also be useful for disambiguation purposes.

Hmm, I wonder – would it make sense to start to identify the information that makes registers useful, and that we should start to keep tabs on? We could then perhaps start lobbying for companies to provide that data, and check that such data is being and continues to be collected? It may not be a register of beneficial ownership, but it would provide handy cribs for trying to establish what companies are part of a corporate grouping…

(By the by, picking up on Owen Boswarva’s post The UK National Information Infrastructure: It’s time for the private sector to release some open data too, these registers provide a proxy for the companies releasing certain sorts of data. For example, we can search for ‘Tesco’ as a supermarket on the FSA site. Of course, if companies were also obliged to publish information about their outlets as open data – something you could argue that as a public company they should be required to do, trading their limited liability for open information about where they might exert that right – we could start to run cross-checks (which is the sort of thing real auditors do, right?) and publish complete records of publicly account performance in terms of regulated quality inspections.)

The CQC and Food Standards Agency both operate quality inspection registers, so what other registers might we go to to build up a picture of how companies – particularly large corporate groupings – behave?

The Environment Agency publish several registers, including one detailing enforcement actions, which might be interesting to track, though I’m not sure how the data is licensed? The HSE (Health & Safety Executive) publish various notices by industry sector and subsector, but again, I’m not too clear on the licensing? The Chief Fire Officers Association (CFOA) publish a couple of enforcement registers which look as if they cover some of the same categories as the CQC data – though how easy it would be to reconcile the two registers, I don’t know (and again, I don’t know how the license is actually registered). One thing to bear in mind is that where registers contain personally identifiable information, any aggregations we build that incorporates such data (if we are licensed to build such things) means (I think) that we become data controllers for the purposes of the Data Protection Act (we are not the maintainers and publishers of the public register so we don’t benefit from the exemptions associated with that role).

Looking at the above, I’m starting to think it could be a really interesting exercise to pick some of the care home provider groups and have a go at aggregating any applicable quality scores and enforcement notices from the CQC, FSA, HSE and CFOA (and even the EA if any of their notices apply! Hmm… does any HSCIC data cover care homes at all too?) Coupled with this, a trawl of directors data to see how the separate companies in a group connect by virtue of directors (and what other companies may be indicated by common directors in a group?).

Other areas perhaps worth exploring – farms incorporated into agricultural groups? (Where would be find that data? One register that could be used to partially hold those locations to account may be the public register of pesticide enforcement notices as well as other EA notices?)

As well as registers and are there any other sources of information about companies we can add in to the mix? There’s lots: for limited companies we can pull down company registration details and lists of directors (and perhaps struck off directors) and some accounting information. Data about charities should be available from the Charities Commission. The HSCIC produces care quality indicators for a range of health providers, as well as prescribing data for individual GP practices. Data is also available about some of the medical trials that particular practices are involved in.

At a local council level, local councils maintain and publish a wide variety of registers, including registers of gaming machine licenses, licensed premises and so on. Where the premises are an outlet of a parent corporate group, we may be able to pick up the name of the parent group as the licensee. (Via @OwenBoswarva, it seems the Gambling Commission has a central list of operating license holders and licensed premises.)

Having identified influential corporate players, we might then look to see whether those same bodies are represented on lobbiest groups, such as the EU register of commission expert groups, or as benefactors of UK Parliamentary All Party groups, or as parties to meetings with Ministers etc.

We can also look across all those companies to see how much money the corporate groups are sinking from the public sector, by inspecting who payments are made to in the masses of transparency spending data that councils, government departments, and services such as the NHS publish. (For an example of this, see Spend Small Local Authority Spending Index; unfortunately, the bulk data you need to run this sort of analysis yourself is not openly available – you need to aggregate and clean it yourself.)

Once we start to get data that lists companies that are part of a group, we can start to aggregate open public data about all the companies in the group and look for patterns of behaviour within the groups, as well as across them. Lapses in one part of the group might suggest a weakness in high level management (useful for the financial analysts?), or act as a red flag for inspection and quality regimes.

Hmmm… methinks it’s time to start putting some of this open data to work; but put it to work by focussing on companies, rather than public bodies…

I think I also need to do a little bit of digging around how public registers are licensed? Should they all be licensed OGL by default? And what guidance, if any, is there around how we can make use of such data and not breach the Data Protection Act?

PS via @RDBinns, What do they know about me? Open data on how organisations use personal data, describing some of the things we can find from the data protection notifications published by the ICO [ICO data controller register].

Using Open Data to Hold Companies to Account?

Some rambling but possibly associated thoughts… I suggest you put Alice’s Restaurant on…

For some time now, I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling about the asymmetries that exist in the open data world as well as total confusion about the notion of transparency.

Part of the nub of the problem (for me) lies with the asymmetric disclosure requirements of public and private services. Public bodies have disclosure requirements (eg Local Government Transparency Code), private companies don’t. Public bodies disclose metrics and spend data, data that can be used in public contract tendering processes by private bodies against public ones tendering for the same service. The private body uses this information – and prices in a discount associated with not having to carry the cost of public reporting – into the bid. The next time the contract is tendered, the public body won’t have access to the (previously publicly disclosed) information that the private body originally had when making its bid. Possibly. I don’t know how tendering works. But from the outside, that’s how it appears to me. (Maybe there needs to be more transparency about the process?)

Open data is possibly a Big Thing. Who knows? Maybe it isn’t. Certainly the big consulting firms are calling it as something worth squillionty billionty of pounds. I’m not sure how they cost it. Maybe I need to dig through the references and footnotes in their reports (Cap Gemini’s Open Data Economy: Unlocking Economic Value by Opening Government and Public Data, Deloitte’s Open growth: Stimulating demand for open data in the UK or McKinsey’s Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information). I don’t know how much those companies have received in fees for producing those reports, or how much they have received in consultancy fees associated with public open data initiatives – somehow, that spend data doesn’t seem to have been curated in a convenient way, or as a #opendatadata bundle? – but I have to assume they’re not doing it to fleece the public bodies and tee up benefits for their other private corporate clients.

Reminds me – I need to read Owen Boswarva’s Who supports the privatisation of Land Registry? and ODUG benefits case for open data release of an authoritative GP dataset again… And remind myself of who sits on the Open Data User Group (ODUG), and other UK gov departmental transparency boards…

And read the FTC’s report Data Brokers: A Call For Transparency and Accountability…

Just by the by, one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of opendata releases is that, along with many other sorts of data, they are most useful when aggregated over time or space, and/or combined with other data sets. Looking at the month on month reports of local spending data from my local council is all very well, but it gets more interesting when viewed over several months or years. Looking at the month on month reports of local spending data from my local council is all very well, but it gets more interesting when looking at spend across councils, as for example in the case of looking at spend to particular companies.

Aggregating public data is one of the business models that helps create some of the GDP figure that contributes to the claimed, anticipated squillionty billionty pounds of financial benefit that will arise from open data – companies like opencorporates aggregating company data, or Spend Network aggregating UK public spending data who hope to start making money selling products off the back of public open data they have curated. Yes – I know a lot of work goes in to cleaning and normalising that data, and that exploiting the data collection as a whole is what their business models are about – and why they don’t offer downloads of their complete datasets, though maybe licenses require they do make links to, or downloads of, the original (“partial”) datasets available?

But you know where I think the real value of those companies lies? In being bought out. By Experian, or Acxiom (if there’s even a hint of personally identifiable data through reverse engineering in the mix), or whoever… A weak, cheap, cop out business model. Just like this: Farmers up in arms over potential misuse of data. (In case you missed it, Climate Corporation was one of the OpenData500 that aggregated shed loads of open data – according to Andrew Stott’s Open Data for Economic Growth report for the World Bank, Climate Corp “uses 60 years of detailed crop yield data, weather observations from one million locations in the United States and 14 terabytes of soil quality data – all free from the US Government – to provide applications that help farmers improve their profits by making better informed operating and financing decisions”. It was also recently acquired by Monsanto – Monsanto – for just under a billion US $. That’s part of the squillionty billionties I guess. Good ol’ open data. Monsanto.)

Sort of related to this – that is, companies buying others to asset strip them for their data – you know all that data of yours locked up in Facebook and Google? Remember MySpace? Remember NNTP? According to the Sophos blog, Just Because You Don’t Give Your Personal Data to Google Doesn’t Mean They Can’t Acquire It. Or that someone else might buy it.

And as another aside – Google – remember Google? They don’t really “read” your email, at least, people don’t, they just let algorithms process it so the algorithms can privately just use that data to send you ads, but no-one will ever know what the content of the email was to trigger you getting that ad (‘cos the cookie tracking, cookie matching services can’t unpick ad bids, ad displays, click thrus, surely, can they?!), well – maybe there are side effects: Google tips off cops after spotting child abuse images in email (for some reason, after initially being able to read that article, my browser can’t load it atm. Server fatigue?). Of course, if Google reads your ads for blind business purposes and ad serving is part of that blind process you accept it. But how does the law enforcement ‘because we can even though you didn’t warrant us to?’ angle work? Does the Post Office look inside the envelope? Is surveillance actually part of Google’s business model?

If you want to up the paranoia stakes, this (from Ray Corrigan, in particular: “Without going through the process of matching each government assurance with contradictory evidence, something I suspect would be of little interest, I would like to draw your attention to one important misunderstanding. It seems increasingly to be the belief amongst MPs that blanket data collection and retention is acceptable in law and that the only concern should be the subsequent access to that data. Assertions to this effect are simply wrong.”) + that. Because one day, one day, they may just find your name on an envelope of some sort under a tonne of garbage. Or an algorithm might… Kid.

But that’s not what this post is about – what this post is about is… Way back when, so very long ago, not so very long ago, there was a license called GPL. GPL. And GPL was a tainting license. findlaw describes the consequences of reusing GPL licensed code as follows: Kid, ‘if a user of GPL code decides to distribute or publish a work that “in whole or in part contains or is derived from the [open source] or any part thereof,” it must make the source code available and license the work as a whole at no charge to third parties under the terms of the GPL (thereby allowing further modification and redistribution).

‘In other words, this can be a trap for the unwary: a company can unwittingly lose valuable rights to its proprietary code.’

Now, friends, GPL scared people so much that another license called LGPL was created, and LGPL allowed you to use LGPL licensed code without fear of tainting your own code with the requirement to open up your own code as GPL would require of it. ‘Cos licenses can be used against you.

And when it comes to open data licenses, they seem to be like LGPL. You can take open public data and aggregate it, and combine it, and mix it and mash it and do what you like with it and that’s fine… And then someone can come along buy that good work you’ve done and do what they want with it. Even Monsanto. Even Experian. And that’s good and right, right? Wrong. The ODUG. Remember the ODUG? The ODUG is the Open Data User Group that lobbies government for what datasets to open up next. And who’s on the ODUG? Who’s there, sitting there, on the ODUG bench, right there, right next to you?

Kid… you wanna be the all-open, all-liberal open data advocate? You wanna see open data used for innovation and exploitation and transparency and all the Good Things (big G, big T) that open data might be used for? Or you wanna sit down on the ODUG bench? With Deloitte, and Experian, and so on…

And if you think that using a tainting open data license so anyone who uses that data has to share it likewise, aggregated, congregated, conjugated, disaggregated, mixed, matched, joined, summarised or just otherwise and anyways processed, is a Good Thing…? Then kid… they’ll all move away from you on the bench there…

Because when they come to buy you, they won’t your data to be tainted in any way that means they’ll have to give up the commercial advantage they’ll have from buying up your work on that open data…

But this post? That’s not what this post is about. This post about holding companies to account. Open data used to hold companies to account. There’s a story to be told that’s not been told about Dr Foster, and open NHS data and fear-mongering and the privatisation of the NHS and that’s one thing…

But another thing is how government might use data to help us protect ourselves. Because government can’t protect us. Government can’t make companies pay taxes and behave responsibly and not rip off consumers. Government needs our help to do that. But can government help us do that too? Protect and Survive.

There’s a thing that DECC – the Department of Energy and Climate Change – do, and that’s publish statistics about domestic energy price statistics and industrial energy price statistics and road fuel and other petroleum product price statistics, and they’re all meaningless. Because they bear little resemblance to spot prices paid when consumers pay their domestic energy bills and road fuel and other petroleum product bills.

To find out what those prices are you have to buy the data from someone like Experian, from something like Experian’s Catalist fuel price data – daily site retail fuel prices – data product. You may be able to caluclate the DECC statistics from that data (or you may not) but you certainly can’t go the other way, from the DECC statistics to anything like the Experian data.

But can you go into your local library and ask to look at a copy of the Experian data? A copy of the data that may or may not be used to generate the DECC road fuel and other petroleum product price statistics (how do they generate those statistics anyway? What raw data do they use to generate those statistics?)

Can you imagine ant-eye-ant-eye-consumer data sets being published by your local council or your county council or your national government that can be used to help you hold companies to account and help you tell them that you know they’re ripping you off and your council off and your government off and that together, you’re not going to stand for it?

Can you imagine your local council publishing the forecourt fuel prices for one petrol stations, just one petrol station, in your local council area every day? And how about if they do it for two petrol stations, two petrol stations, each day? And if they do it for three forecourts, three, can you imagine if they do it for three petrol stations…? And can you, can you imagine prices for 50 petrol stations a day being published by your local council, your council helping you inform yourself about how you’re being manipulated, can you imagine…? (It may not be so hard – food hygiene ratings are published for food retail environments across the England, Northern Ireland and Wales…

So let’s hear it for open data, and how open data can be used to hold corporates to account, and how public bodies can use open data to help you make better decisions (which is a good neoliberal position to take and one which the other folk on the bench tell you that that’s what you want and that and markets work, though they also fall short of telling you that the models say that markets work with full information but you don’t have the information, and even if you did, you wouldn’t understand it, because you don’t really know how to make a good decision, but at the end of the day you don’t want a decision, you just want a good service fairly delivered, but they don’t tell that it’s all right to just want that…)

And let’s hear it for public bodies making data available whether it’s open or not, making it available by paying for it if they have to and making it available via library services so that we can start using it to start holding companies to account and start helping our public services, and ourselves, protect ourselves from the attacks being mounted on us by companies, and their national government supporters, who take on debt, and who allow them to take on debt, to make dividend payouts but not capital investment and subsidise the temporary driving down of prices (which is NOT a capital investment) through debt subsidised loss leading designed to crush competition in a last man standing contest that will allow monopolistic last man standing price hikes at the end of it…

And just remember, if there’s anything you want, you know where you can get it… At Alice’s… or the library… only they’re shutting them down, aren’t they…? So that leaves what..? Google?