Digital
Help shape Scotland’s Open Data future – Imagining success in 2036
February 17, 2026 by Stewart Hamilton 1 Comment | Category Digital Scotland, Open data
I’m Martin Macfie, and I lead the Open Data team in the Data Division of the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate. We’re inviting you to take part in a short workshop to help shape a bold, future-focused message for open data in Scotland.
What we’ve been working on
Since publishing the independent report on open data in Scotland in August 2024, we’ve been working across the three themes I set out in my previous blog – and we’ve made strong progress:
Under these three themes, we have:
- Launched a multi-year programme of work, in partnership with StormID, to replace and enhance the existing statistics.gov.scot platform, supported by evidence from an alpha.
- Finalised the data and digital commitment for Scotland’s current open government action plan (2021-25), and we are supporting the co-creation of Scotland’s next open government action plan. One of the new themes in the upcoming plan will be the “Ethical use of digital technology, open data and information.”
- Explored how to implement the recommendations from the independent report by gathering views from public sector, academic, and civil society partners, and by collaborating with organisations such as the University of Edinburgh Business School. We’d like to thank everyone who contributed. We learned the importance of purpose-driven publication, stronger feedback loops, and clearer communication of value so that we can build open data together. We presented our findings at the Better Data Community conference in November 2025. A clear, shared vision for open data in Scotland has emerged as essential to this work.
To help co-‑create that shared vision, we’re inviting you to take part in a short workshop to help shape a bold, future-focused message for open data in Scotland.
We’re imagining what success for open data in Scotland could look like in 2036 — and we’ll be cocreating a message that reflects Scotland’s ambition and leadership in open data. Each 2‑hour MS Teams session will explore:
- What’s realistic and achievable
- What’s possible with blue-sky thinking
- What Scotland’s open data future could look like when we allow ourselves to think big
These workshops will also to help provide evidence to inform the co-creation of Scotland’s next open government action plan.
Your perspective is essential, and we’d love you to join one of two online sessions.
These are taking place on:
- 10 am – 12 noon on Thursday 12 March
- 10 am – 12 noon on Friday 13 March
Please sign up and join using the Eventbrite link
You may also be interested in:
- Phase 2: Co-creating Scotland’s Open Government Action Plan: 2026-2030. This blog announces a publication of independent report on public engagement on trust, and invites people to co-creation workshops in March 2026
- Data Lab Community themed month on Open Data in April 2026. More information to follow on the Data Lab Community events page
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Tags: Data, Digital Scotland, Open Data in Scotland, scottish government
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Thanks Martin, Auren and the team for yesterday’s session and for sharing the slides.
It was really useful to see how the data.gov.scot work is progressing in practice — particularly the focus on discovery, publishing workflows and usability. That makes the ambition set out here feel much more tangible.
The usability findings were especially helpful in highlighting how people actually move from finding data through to using it — whether through APIs, filtering or downloads — and where there are still some points of friction.
From our side, working with data from sources such as DWP Stat‑Xplore and Public Health Scotland across different geographies, this connects strongly with the broader point about purpose‑driven publication and clearer communication of value. The role of Data Zones and Intermediate Zones is particularly important here in helping to understand variation in need at a more local, place‑based level.
A lot of our work has been focused on bringing together structured, decision‑relevant information with open data and API‑based approaches — for example through our FFP work — so that data can be used more directly in operational and decision‑making contexts. In that respect, it’s great to see the usability direction here, which feels broadly in line with CKAN‑style approaches to search and findability.
We’d be very interested to see how this develops further from an API perspective — particularly around metadata, referencing and accessibility to support reuse. We’d also be delighted to test, via the API, datasets relating to children and families as they become available, particularly in line with Fairer Futures priorities, across Health and Social Care Partnerships, and reflecting differences between urban and rural geographies. Consideration of SIMD methodologies and associated data will also be important in this context.
It’s encouraging to see this being taken forward by Auren and the team, bringing together platform delivery, user insight and the wider open data vision. That feels important in shaping what “success in 2036” looks like in practice.