This week I was invited to Malaysia as one of 8 members of the advisory panel on big data to the Malaysian government. The meeting was part of the Big Data Week taking place in Kuala Lumpur where I gave two presentations and was part of a panel discussion. Malaysia intends to become a big data hub for ASEAN countries. To that end it brought well over 2000 people together to discuss big data, and as part of that Richard Stirling (of the ODI) and I were there to highlight the role of open (government) data in that. Next to the conference as part of the advisory panel I met for a day in a closed-door session with MDeC, the agency that is responsible for the implementation of Malaysia’s big data plans. On my own initiative I met with the Ministry for Administrative Modernisation’s planning unit (MAMPU) to discuss the change management and community aspects of becoming a more open government in more detail, and see how that might be tied in with the ongoing efforts of the World Bank’s collaboration with the Malaysian government.
During the conference I gave two presentations. The first on the notion that to make sure that open and big data have a broad impact socially and economically, you need to have a strategy that involves all stakeholders, and move beyond the big company focus the effort currently seems to have. SME’s, civic organizations, and individual citizens play a crucial role, not just bigger corporations and academic institutions who provide the needed skill sets.
In this presentation I looked at half a dozen or so emergent patterns that stand out from all open data stories I’ve been part of in Europe and elsewhere to make that clear.
The second presentation took just one of those patterns: that in ‘open data’ openness is much more important than data, and zoomed in on it, under the title ‘Open data is the biggest data of all’. In this presentation I posited that openness is a necessity in a networked society, to be a visible and thus acknowledged part of the network, that in aggregate open data is bigger than whatever big data set, and that openness hits a large number of factors that make non-lineair impact possible. The type of growth that we promise ourselves from big data, but which itself in reality usually only aims for incremental growth for established players. Our societies however need that non-lineair kick. We need to reason backwards from where we want to see socio-economic impact, to which type of circumstances, such as data availability, and broad inclusiveness are needed to get there.
Finally I did a fun panel debate with Michael Cornwell on the new ethical questions emerging around open data and privacy, where I made a call for more ‘data awareness’ and called upon entrepreneurs to be straightforward to their clients on how they are using data. The way a company deals with the data that describes me and my behaviour is part of my deal and interaction with a company, and any intentional opaqueness concerning data from the company side should be seen as a breach of trust and short-changing the client.