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Building the public image of statisticsBuilding the public image of statistics

- - The importance of user oriented disseminationThe importance of user oriented dissemination

Øystein Olsen

Director General, Statistics Norway

International seminar on dissemination

Chisinau, Moldova, May 27th 2010

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Statistics Norway in a nutshell:

• Independence anchored in The Statistics Act (1989)

• 1000 employees– Responsible for 85 percent of all official statistics in Norway

• A Research Department within the institution– Serving ministries with macroeconomic and micro simulation

models

• Statistics based on administrative registers and surveys

• About 300 statistics produced and 1000 (news) releases on www.ssb.no annually

• International cooperation– The EU/EFTA statistical system– International consulting

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Statistics Norway – an institution that counts

Statistics Norway in three words:

• Independent

• Reliable

• Beyond borders

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From our Strategy…

• Satisfied users and motivated respondents

– Official statistics are a common good– Analyses provide insight and

coherence

• Cooperation to improve statistics

– International cooperation to promote comparability in the statistics

– Assistance to countries that need to develop a statistical system

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Quality of Statistics

Statistics shall be

• relevant

• accurate

• timely and punctual

• comparable and coherent

• easily accessible and well documented

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User orientation in practice…

• Publish on web– to all users– at the same time– for free

• Publish metadata for all statistics– About the Statistics– Contact persons (not by position, but by knowledge)

• Give media special attention– They are very important distributors– Treat all media equal

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User orientation (cont)

• Publish full content in all languages – Norwegian– English

• Make the information understandable for everybody– Simple language– Analysis and short stories– Graphs, maps and visualisations

• Correct errors instantly– and be very open on what was wrong

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Add some extras…

• Publish exciters to attract new user groups– Name statistics– Historical statistics– School pages

• Hold free courses for special user groups– Media– Librarians– Students– Public sector

• Create a few special products as give-aways– This is Norway

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Or we could just…

Create a completely new web site… ?

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Ambitions – New ssb.no

• New publishing systems– Develop new user-friendly and efficient publishing systems where

statisticians to a greater extent can arrange their own content.

• New services for wide dissemination– Developing new services and functionality for the so-called

distributed information objects, ie to make available content elements (figures, tables, graphs, and more) outside ssb.no.

• New graphical user interface– Establish new design and new graphical user interface for ssb.no,

including the revised structure and new types of page content.

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New ssb.no for prosumers- what is a distributed information object?

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… more about this in the next presentation

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Thank you for your attention!

Questions ?