Tag: opendata

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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.

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Earlier today I gave a short talk at 3D Camp in Limerick, Ireland. I explored how open data can inform digital making, and how digital making can help create data. So that we can get around to making things that matter, that solve something for us or the communities we’re part of. Away from making as an individual act, creating a single object. We’re not living up to the potential of social media, open data, internet of things and digital making. In part because we’re still learning, in part because these four things form silos, with not much cross-over. So I discussed how to build a bridge between open data and making. So we can best make use of the new affordances these new tools give us. That goes beyond acquiring skills (like being able to operate a laser cutter) to becoming making literate where you are able to detect what is needed for your living environment to work/be better, then conceptualize, and make a solution, that creates impact through application.

Slides below.

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Yesterday I presented at TEDxZwolle. For a general audience I presented the case for Open Data, and called upon them to get involved. Because of the potential, but mostly because it is necessary to understand and deal with the complexity of our societies and lives.

Otherwise we are just ants, with no clue of how the ant hill works, even though we help create it with our actions. In our networked society we need to understand the ant hill.

Don’t be an ant, understand our ant hill. Get involved. Use Open Data. Understand your world.

Early May I will be speaking at TEDxTallinn 2013.

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Last week I co-hosted a session between a number of public sector data holders and a handful of the biggest existing players in the market re-using that same type of data. I’m deliberately vague about who those market parties were, and what type of data is involved, as it is not really relevant to my observation, and there is a still ongoing conversation with those organisations.

The session started from the idea that the public sector data holders could provide a much richer and real-time form of data on top of the usual stuff already available to third party re-users. We thought to discuss how that richer data should be shared to be easily used by the existing market.

As it turns out Christensen’s innovation theory seems to apply here: big vested interests are not in a position to innovate, as all their processes and resource allocation is geared to doing well or better what they are already doing well. Even if all people involved want it to be different, the existing structures will usually dictate otherwise. Case in point here was that the existing re-users currently have a lead-time of at least 6 months to incorporate new data in their products, and are not at all ready to handle real-time info (unless that real-time info is merely an overlay on their existing data). Also the users of their products may have up-date cycles of 2 years, rendering any real-time updates to their data useless.

The only third party in the room that seemed to say ‘bring it on’ was an open source community initiative. They however, as Christensen also predicts, will not be perceived as any threat to existing up-market players. At least not until it’s too late for them. It is this open source alternative that is also most likely to reach whole groups of new types of users of the data.

It’s interesting as well to see again that ‘release it and they will come’ is not a viable way to open government data. Releasing it needs to be accompanied by these type of conversations, and capacity building by (new) market players and citizens, so that the potential of open data can be realized.

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I have been visiting the World Bank the past days to discuss various open data projects, e.g. in Kenya, Moldova and Tunisia.
During one of the meetings, an informal one during lunch, we discussed the challenges we see for open data in the coming time.
These are the challenges I mentioned as seeing become (more) relevant at the moment, looking forward.

  1. Turning open data into a policy instrument for government bodies, so that government needs open data for their own policy efforts. This is putting open data forward to:
    • cut budgets
    • measure impact
    • stimulate participaton
    • have others through app building contribute to policy aims
    • re-use data of other PSB’s
  2. Increasing the skills and ‘literacy’ of citizens and re-users around open data. The original open data activists have the data they wanted, so we need to grow the group of people who wants data. That means also increasing the number of people who can (or see how they can) work with data.
  3. Getting government bodies to work together across borders the way citizens already do. Coders are networked across the EU, and work together. Public sector bodies are bound to jurisdictions, and connections are routed through higher hierarchical levels, not at operational level, where practical matters are at hand, and where open data could be brought forward.
  4. Stimulating corporations to open data, in contrast or complementary to published government data. Stimulating citizen generated or citizen shared data.
  5. Measuring policy impact in two ways: by making impact visible in connected data sets, that exist before, during and after policy implementation for non-open data policies, and by collecting stories plus their metadata around open data related policies to measure the non-economical impact of open data.
  6. Making sure that the notion of what ‘real’ open data is remains intact when the technology becomes less visible as it disappears under the hood of the applications that use open data and where users of those applications may not realize it is based on open government data. (much in the same way it is necessary to keep the importance of an open and free, dumb at the core, smart at the edges, internet in the awareness of people, because that is what drives the affordances we value in much of the things we do over the internet)

Posted on
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I have been visiting the World Bank the past days to discuss various open data projects, e.g. in Kenya, Moldova and Tunisia.
During one of the meetings, an informal one during lunch, we discussed the challenges we see for open data in the coming time.

These are the challenges I mentioned as seeing become (more) relevant at the moment, looking forward.

  1. Turning open data into a policy instrument for government bodies, so that government needs open data for their own policy efforts. This is putting open data forward to:
    • cut budgets
    • measure impact
    • stimulate participaton
    • have others through app building contribute to policy aims
    • re-use data of other PSB’s
  2. Increasing the skills and ‘literacy’ of citizens and re-users around open data. The original open data activists have the data they wanted, so we need to grow the group of people who wants data. That means also increasing the number of people who can (or see how they can) work with data.
  3. Getting government bodies to work together across borders the way citizens already do. Coders are networked across the EU, and work together. Public sector bodies are bound to jurisdictions, and connections are routed through higher hierarchical levels, not at operational level, where practical matters are at hand, and where open data could be brought forward.
  4. Stimulating corporations to open data, in contrast or complementary to published government data. Stimulating citizen generated or citizen shared data.
  5. Measuring policy impact in two ways: by making impact visible in connected data sets, that exist before, during and after policy implementation for non-open data policies, and by collecting stories plus their metadata around open data related policies to measure the non-economical impact of open data.
  6. Making sure that the notion of what ‘real’ open data is remains intact when the technology becomes less visible as it disappears under the hood of the applications that use open data and where users of those applications may not realize it is based on open government data. (much in the same way it is necessary to keep the importance of an open and free, dumb at the core, smart at the edges, internet in the awareness of people, because that is what drives the affordances we value in much of the things we do over the internet.