News Story

Citizen Data – empowering citizens

Alan Fletcher, Monday 18 Aug 2014

KMi joins three-month feasibility study on how to empower citizens with their own data.
Five organisations have come together to run a three-month feasibility study to explore how to empower citizens with their own data. The miData Studio initiative is a collaboration between the Open University ( KMi and MCT) and:
Milton Keynes Council
Ctrl-Shift                                                   Specialist consultancy
Cabinet Office                                           Govt dept supporting the Cabinet/PM
Connected Digital Economy Catapult       Government-funded innovation centre

The miData Studio project aims to create an open, collaborative environment where citizens, the council and developers explore how empowering citizens with their own information can enable better services, better quality of life and efficiency in the delivery of public services.
The project will develop exemplar use cases that deliver benefit to the council and citizens and the local economy more generally.
The project will look for new ways for citizens to gain control of their information, exploring how they can give controlled access to trusted service providers for the services they want or need. It will also act as a pilot for the Cabinet Office’s identity assurance scheme in a local authority context.
This overarching project aim is to empower citizens with their own data in a way they can trust. The project will create a space for learning about working with citizens’ data, building a safe environment to try things out and study what works and what doesn’t work. Crucially the project aims to understand how to do this in such a way that individuals are in control of their data. As such the project is being run in accordance with seven Trust Principles:
i.      Access – citizens own their shared data and can copy or withdraw it at will
ii.     Control – consent must be given for any type of data use;
iii.   Minimization – only the data needed for the specific processing operation should be used;
iv.   Transparency – the citizen must know about use of their data;
v.     Correctness – the data source must be correct and easy to update;
vi.   Simplicity – services designed to be comprehensible to all citizens;
vii. Compliance – citizens wish to be assured that services meet the foregoing principles.
The feasibility study will examine the detail of how the Principles would work in practice and make recommendations for engineering them in to the design of the project.
The findings of the pilot project will be shared widely for the benefit of everyone with an interest in citizen data.