Governments have access to data that highlights community sentiment and needs beyond that available to industry. Increasingly, they are acknowledging this data holds value. As well as being more willing to publicly release it, they have introduced policies to support reactive data requests.
To strengthen this approach and support infrastructure planning and decisions, the role of government as a data custodian must evolve into a deliberate position of data discovery and cleansing then sharing. For example, land use planning agencies should collaborate with infrastructure departments to audit and assess the range of available data then release it to relevant organisations. This will ensure the data is available to project proponents from the early strategic planning stages onwards.
The next step would be to make data collection, analysis and presentation more consistent. This would produce reliable, meaningful and comparable data that could be aggregated to provide a uniform perspective, leading to improved decision-making and greater equity.
To provide a consistent view, there needs to be a framework to support data collection across agencies and levels of local government. A standardised set of strategic questions could then be applied by multiple data collection agencies across local government areas to enable an understanding of regional and local needs.
Project proponents and infrastructure policy organisations would collaborate to assess data needs then develop questions that elicit useful information using user-centred design. Collected information should be presented in a user-friendly format for a range of capabilities, and developed around specific infrastructure provider and user use-cases.
An important aspect of these data collection projects would be considering privacy and data sovereignty issues to protect individual and community interests.