Abstract:

The digital age has created an unprecedented amount of information. Public administrations handle vast quantities of data, e.g., city councils have digital information about pollen, pollution, bicycle lanes, green areas and animal rescue activities, among many others.
The Degree in Public Administration is studied at Universitat Politècnica de València. During the fourth year, students have a compulsory subject, Information Management. So far, the practical sessions have focused on some key aspects for the students, basically relational databases through Microsoft Access in order to gain competencies in structuring information.
A novel practical session is presented that will help students to achieve competencies related to a higher level of ICT and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Students know that Open Data repositories exist but they do not deal with them during their studies. Thus, the proposed practical session will be focused on accessing, curating and visualizing Open Data through a tool that is freely available for any user who creates a Microsoft account, namely Power BI Desktop.
The raison d’être of Open Data is to empower society by releasing the information that public bodies use. As an example, a municipality may have data on historical and current pollen levels. Opening access to it may help citizens to create apps that show forecasts and help allergic people. This has been the case in many cities and regions, where entrepreneurs have created apps for the public. Many more examples also help transparency. At the same time, governments need to deal with anonymity issues, e.g., a city may have information on transport passes that could help entrepreneurs find routes that need to be improved. However, the information must be anonymized so that users may not be identified, and their personal data kept anonymous.
In order to help students start grasping the power of Open Data, a big dataset, e.g. the animal rescue historical dataset from the London Fire Brigade, will be used as a source for a practical session. Students will familiarize themselves with Microsoft Power BI and will first clean the data and then visualize the information with powerful filters and dashboard widgets.
How the practical session impacts the students will be measured by a survey previous to the practical session and afterward, where the following items will be analyzed: their view of the public interest in having open data; the intention to navigate open data by themselves; possible applications of open data for the citizenship, proposing ideas of what data could be made public and how it could impact the society.
By analyzing the pre- and post-survey, the impact of the practical session on the students will be measured.

Keywords:

Open Data, Public Administration, Higher Education, Information Management.