Despite initial opposition from bureaucrats, open data is reshaping the way the State Government and public service interacts with the public and the media.

Today, the State Government’s open data website is officially being launched by Premier Jay Weatherill, along with an open data declaration requiring all agencies to ensure their data is publicly accessible.

It’s not often a government initiative significantly improves the ability of the media to tell stories. But in the last year, InDaily has revealed:

•  The number of pubs running live music in South Australia has dropped, while the total number of pubs and hotels has increased
• Federal money in South Australia flows disproportionately to military and defence contractors
• And we charted every baby name in South Australia from the 1940s (peak ‘Jay’ was in 1982)
• Tomorrow – a visualisation of every earthquake in South Australia since 1840 by location and magnitude

All of those stories have been made possible by the State Government’s push to have the public service release all of the data and records it keeps online, through hub website data.sa.gov.au.

“We already have among the highest number of data sets openly licensed in Australia,” Weatherill said this morning.

“Opening our data to all means that we can work together to design policy and projects that will benefit our citizens.

“As the custodian of a significant amount of data, the State Government can help to fuel a boom in the local digital marketplace but it’s equally important that industry and community groups release their data too.”

Despite data.sa.gov.au being up for most of the year, getting the data sets from the public service has not always been an easy task.

One anecdote.

A key part of the open data push has been running an open data competition, asking members of the public to use the data in novel and powerful ways.

In other states (who have been doing this longer than we have) these events are called GovHacks. Not in South Australia, though – InDaily understands that public service bosses were too concerned about how that name might play in the media.

Instead we got Unleashed, which is a different name for exactly the same thing.

That’s reflective of much of the attitude from our public service mandarins to open data. InDaily understands many are still unwilling to fully give up control of data they’ve been hoarding for years – an attitude that might be more difficult to maintain after Weatherill’s announcement today.

This year, the first the Unleashed comp has run (it’s now going to be run annually, the Premier announced this morning), local app team Bazinga took the State Government data on the location of sporting clubs, parks and recreational facilities and added a social layer allowing users to get groups of friends or strangers together for an activity.

SocialActive picked up the $40,000 government-sponsored first prize at Unleashed.

Meanwhile, real-time bus location data is very close to release.

The Department of Transport, Planning and Infrastructure have been working to implement a real-time location feed – fed by GPS systems mounted on every bus – for some time.

The real-time GPS data will allow mobile phone apps to be developed showing the location of every Adelaide Metro bus across Adelaide. Commuters will be able to watch their bus arrive at their stop in real time.

InDaily understands the real-time data has been live for several months, and is currently being implemented by several app developers.