My default answer to this is no, that we should treat it much like we do other public goods. Just like any venture, government agencies need to reconfigure their budgets and IT operations to provide a public API offering. In this day and age, government needs to take into account that data and APIs are a twenty-first century public offering. If agencies are trying to justify data/APIs from a budgetary perspective, the first step would be to reallocate funding priorities and eliminate antiquated services these offerings replace.
Pay for the data, streamline IT processes that make it easier and cheaper to publish data, eliminate outdated operations they replace and empower third-parties to leverage that data and provide more market-based public services. If we’re going to start charging for data/APIs, we need to first do a holistic assessment of what the ecosystem looks like if we’re going to innovate our thinking around it, as opposed to looking at it from a micro perspective.
I can see in high-usage cases where there may be some merit to charging for data usage, but we’re still a long ways away from that discussion. Let’s innovate first before jumping into pay-for-use fees.
Thank you for letting me share.
The idea that large users/businesses that directly benefit from these APIs could help defray this cost is appealing to these managers.
- Josh Tauberer (@JoshData) http://razor.occams.info
I don't think you could really ever justify charging for API access without first making bulk data available for free on a regular basis.The only justification I can think for charging for API use is if it was to exceed a rate cap that would otherwise restrict other people's use of the API. In other words, if an API provider has a set amount of bandwidth and server capacity and one user is consuming 99% of that, then you'd want rate limiting in place to ensure that everyone has more equitable access. Charging could be a way of surpassing the normal rate limiting and passing on that additional cost to the relevant users (at cost).
In most cases, I don't think there's a justifiable cost recovery model if tax payers already paid for the data collection and providing it via API is cheaper than FOIA processing. For the most part the amount of overhead to handle payment processing in government is probably a little overbearing as well, so it might be difficult to really pass on the cost at a reasonable rate while actually recovering cost in government.
If a government API is at risk of needing to implement rate limiting it could probably ensure a basic quality of service to some syndicators that could provide heavier levels of use and manage their cost recovery and business model however they see fit. This is already generally the norm for transforming government data into more useable forms.
Depending on the data involved, I think there will be varying levels of sensitivity to equitable access and the need for government to provide resources to meet demand versus allowing paid privileged access or private companies to fill the gap.
Most of this assumes we're talking about read-only data. For write APIs, I think government should generally encourage that and I think you could usually argue that third party services built around write APIs will save government money - although they might not always save citizens money
On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Hale, David (NIH/NLM) [E] <dave...@mail.nih.gov> wrote:
I see data quality as a requirement of data provision. If you’re going to release data and encourage people to build useful things, you are obligated to aggressively address data quality issues. Additionally, providing data without addressing the nuances or subject matter expertise required to utilize it severely limits the potential impact.
My data responsibilities, as stated in my PMAP, are bottom-to-top: data acquisition, restructuring, meaningful access via development of search classes/engine, provision via API and downloads, AND data quality. I think this type of vertical integration is necessary during the early stages of opening data. Perhaps later, once this ecosystem is more self-sustaining and the cultural issues have been addressed, it will transition to a more horizontal structure, with external stakeholders taking a greater role and government acting more as a data steward.
As for ongoing budgetary issues, in my experience the vast majority of resources and headaches focus on 1) meaningful access via development of search engines/classes that incorporate the subject matter expertise of an agency and 2) data quality, which usually has to be addressed both systemically and culturally, frequently with external stakeholders. Not surprisingly, these are the areas that are most inherently governmental.
David
David Hale
Project Manager, Pillbox
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health