State of the Service Report 2010-11: Australian Public Service Employee Survey Results

I appreciate that publishing the State of the Service Report results to data.gov.au is a start. However, the results are hardly presented in an accessible manner. OK for statisticians, but what about the public? A small start would be to use textual column headings rather than question numbers and response scale text rather than numeric values. Little things help. The major point, however, is that the public service is a mysterious black box to many people. So why not do more to make it less so when publishing quantitative data? So the challenge here is balance and that is not something achieved by simply placing statistics on data.gov.au Its a tad ugly I know, but the Canadian Public Service sets a better example. As, indeed they do by publishing results by individual agency example. To get somewhere with this we really need to grasp the mettle in relation to accessibility at a technical and conceptual level. This also relates to intent. If the intent of publishing this data is to provide a window on the public service, and invite the public to contribute in a positive way, then this exercise is lacking. It is no good if the way information is presented makes it onerous for people to play. I am sympathetic to the APSC and believe that it needs to be resourced more appropriately to engage the community with its data holdings for the betterment of APS agencies. To a considerable extent this boils down to issuing the invitation and going some way towards inviting the community with a palatable means to explore and contribute. So design is important. Report on data.gov.au

Steve Davies Founder, OZloop