Monday, November 27, 2006

Frontier economics report: DCA release some costs data

The DCA have disclosed some of the information they previously refused to release to the Campaign for FOI and the BBC. They had requested the background data related to the costs review of the FOIA (and used in the Frontier economics report). What we can now see is each request covered by the survey listed by a unique no against data for time spent, outcome etc. The breakdown by Dept asked for by the CFOI has not been released. You can't also see what the requests were about in terms of a title or summary for the request. The data released is in PDFs and can't be placed into any other application for further analysis. I will post some further comment after some more detailed reading.

Details: see the DCA disclosure log entry. They have released the following:

-Data collection template [3 pages]
-Statistical data from government departments [53 pages]
-Analysis of statistical data [4 pages]

Martin at Open Secrets has made two posts on the issue & points out some interesting issues comparing this data with the final Frontier report:

-Why did the DCA change its mind?

-DCA backs down on release of FOI data

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Although the DCA have posted their dataset in pdf format on their disclosure log, the version supplied to the BBC was in spreadsheet format, and this is how we have posted it at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/opensecrets/2006/11/dca_backs_down_on_release_of_f.html.

This will help anyone who wants to do any further analysis of the data.

Martin Rosenbaum