Open Data: Help "Make it Real"

As I indicated yesterday, I have serious doubts about the UK government's policy on copyright. But while that has been something of a disappointment to me - I naively hoped for better - its work on open data, by contrast, has exceeded my expectations.

It has already made a number of important moves in this area, and with a major new consultation - bearing the rather splendid title “Making Open Data Real” - it looks like it intends to move further toward openness in this area. Not only that, but is actually asking for our views on many aspects. This is quite unlike its approach for copyright enforcement, where it is trying to push through all kinds of stupidities and hope that no one notices, so I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.

On Open Enterprise blog.

What's the Father of the Wiki Doing at Nike?

The idea of the wiki is now so pervasive that we rather take it for granted - "oh, let's just use a wiki" is a typical cry these days. But it's important to remember that for all its simplicity, it took someone to come up with the idea (just as it did for the "simple" idea of a hyperlinked Web.)

That person was Ward Cunningham, who has led a colourful professional life, as his Wikipedia entry (oh look, a wiki...) makes clear:

He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. He is founder of the Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programming conference which it sponsors. Cunningham was part of the Smalltalk community. From December 2003 until October 2005, he worked for Microsoft Corporation in the "patterns & practices" group. From October 2005 to May 2007, he held the position of Director of Committer Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation.

In May 2007, Cunningham joined AboutUs as its chief technology officer.[2][3][4] On March 24, 2011 The Oregonian reported that Cunningham had quietly departed AboutUs to join Venice-based CitizenGlobal, a startup working on crowd-sourced video content, as their Chief Technology Officer. He remains "an adviser" with AboutUs.

Well, he is moving again, to fill this rather interesting, if horribly-named, post at Nike:

At Nike we know tomorrow's world will be radically different from today's. To thrive in a world where resources are constrained, where people and governments and systems are fully connected, where sustainability is an imperative, not a choice, where transparency is requisite, we believe we need innovation. Disruptive, radical, jaw-dropping innovation. Innovation we cannot imagine. That kind of innovation is not going to come only from within. It will require the best of what we've got, along with unlikely partnerships, collaborations and open innovation.

We believe that data and technology will be key to unleashing new innovations.

Nike is looking for a person with the skills, passion and know-how to use data and technology to solve problems standing between business-as-usual and a sustainable future. We're looking for a creative visionary who also has both feet firmly on the ground — one in Nike and one in the open data world, ready to run. We're looking for a Code for a Better World Fellow.

The fellow will help Nike determine the steps needed to open our sustainability data to communities of data-obsessed programmers, visual designers and researchers.

The fellow will work with Nike's data managers to landscape current data and craft a desired future state; manage the formatting and release of data to the open data community; curate use of the data within the community; bring knowledge from the open data community back to Nike as actionable steps; attend conferences related to open data to grow Nike's network and profile in this space; and ultimately create/steward the creation of prototypes that demonstrate how opening Nike's sustainability data can be a force to drive change.

What's particularly interesting here is the emphasis on open data. So far, we have seen mainly governments opening up their data stores, but there are many benefits for companies, to do so too, as this article points out (it was also the source of the news that Cunningham was moving.) It also points out that Nike has been in the forefront of innovative business practices in this area for a while:

Nike have a surprisingly long history of releasing data. Back in 2000, they started publishing a list of all their contracted factories (scraped list by Selena Deckelmann) and related audit information. The aim? To improve their factory working conditions, both by improved scrutiny of Nike’s own measurement systems, and by enabling direct on the ground inspection and campaigning by activists.

Employing the Father of the Wiki is another smart move, and I can't wait to see what he does there.

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An Open Government Data Licence for the World?

As I've noted before, the UK government is now arguably the leader when it comes to open data. Of course, that's not really the point: this isn't a competition with winners and losers, but a global effort to open things up. As such, it would be nice if there were more collaboration between the different governments - things like this, for example:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Season on Open Data

Well, it seems to be Open Data week here on Computerworld UK. After my report on the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin, one of whose principal themes was open data, and my post about proposals for a data.gov.eu portal, this morning we have the following major announcement by the UK Prime Minister:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Data Portals Become Fashionable: Time to Worry?

Yesterday I mentioned Nigel Shadbolt, who has played a leading role in the opening up of government data in the UK. By chance, I've just come across a report [.pdf] he wrote for the EU about doing much the same, but on a larger scale. Curiously, this is dated 15 December 2010, but this is the first I've seen it. Either it's been buried deep within the Brussels system, or I've been remiss in catching it. Either way, it's still well worth reading.

On Open Enterprise blog.

OpenCorporates - Open Database of the Corporate World

One of the interesting offshoots of open source is open data. It's still very early days, which means that few have started thinking about the tricky next stage: how to build a business around open data. But some brave souls are already trying, including the company behind something called OpenCorporates, launched a few months back.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Public Data Corporation: How Open, and How Public?

I've been following the move to open data by the UK government for some time on this blog. Major milestones include the creation of the data.gov.uk portal and the recent announcement back in November that “all departments will publish details of their spending over £25,000 for the last six months.” Now we have this:

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Limits to Openness

Unless you live in certain countries or read certain newspapers, you will have been deluged over the last few days with “revelations” from those US diplomatic cables that have been released by Wikileaks (if you somehow missed all this fun, try this excellent “Wikileaks Cablegate Roundup”.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Give Us All Open Data - But Not Yet

As a I wrote a couple of days ago, the current flood of open data announcements, notably by the UK government, is something of a two-edged sword. It's great to have, but it also imposes a correspondingly great responsibility to do something useful with it.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Data Good, Open Source Bad?

Last Friday, I went along to what I thought would be a pretty routine press conference about open data - just the latest in a continuing drip-feed of announcements in this area from the UK government. I was soon disabused.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Access Meets Open Archaeology

How could I resist OA meets OA thanks to OA?

The OA Library has been developed by Oxford Archaeology in order to allow us to distribute grey literature client reports and other documents to wider audiences. Oxford Archaeology is committed to a policy of Open Access to archaeological data; this website allows us to disseminate material as widely as possible.

And all towards the greater good of open archaeology...

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Directgov Review - No Time to Lose

One of the heartening trends that I've noted in recent years is a gradually opening up of government around the world - in both directions. As well as making more data available, the UK government too is also beginning to realise that the public wants - and can - help by providing input on the things that affect and matter to them.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Can You Make Money from Open Source+Open Data?

One of the interesting trends over the last few months has been the increasing activity in the field of open data. In the UK, this has been given new impetus by the incoming government, which has promised to make much more government data available (although to what extent that will actually happen remains to be seen).

On Open Enterprise blog.

An Uncommon Commons in Linz

As its name suggests, a commons is an outgrowth of things held in common, like common land. This has been extended to the digital sphere with great success - notably in the world of free software. But here's an interesting move that takes the commons back to its common-land roots: the Austrian city of Linz is creating an "open commons region":

Die Leitlinien für die Realisierung der »Open-Commons-Region Linz« fordern unter anderem die Einrichtung eines Open-Commons-Beirates, den Aufbau einer Koordinationsstelle, Initiativen für Angebote in den Bereichen Bildung (Open Courseware) und öffentliche Datenbestände, wie zum Beispiel Stadtinformationen oder Stadtkarten (Open Data), Überarbeitung des magistratsweiten Intranets mit Einsatz von Open-Source-Software für das Betriebs-, Redaktions- und Datenbanksystem und Prüfung des Einsatzes von weiteren freien Softwareprodukten in Teilen der Unternehmensgruppe Stadt Linz.

[Via Google Translate: The guidelines for the implementation of the "open-commons Region Linz 'demands include the creation of an open-Commons Advisory Board, the establishment of a coordination center, initiatives for deals in the areas of education (Open Course Ware) and public databases, such as city information or maps (Open Data), revision of the magistratsweiten intranet with the use of open source software for the industrial, editorial and database system and audit of the use of other free software products in parts of the group Linz.]

which ticks most of the open boxes. The expected benefits are also wide ranging:

Die Initiative soll Kosten reduzieren, Abhängigkeiten vermeiden, Eigeninitiative fördern, die Wirtschaft stärken, Wertschöpfung erzeugen, Transparenz herstellen und Rechtssicherheit schaffen.

[The initiative aims to reduce costs, avoid dependency, initiative to promote, strengthen the economy, create value, establishing transparency and legal certainty.]

Sadly, it seems that it won't cure the common cold, despite the affinities of name.

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Open Sourcing Politics

“Linux is subversive”: so begins “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond's analysis of the open source way. The subversion there was mainly applied to the world of software, but how much more subversive are the ideas that lie behind open source when applied to politics.

On Open Enterprise blog.

RMS and Tim Berners-Lee: Separated at Birth?

We all knew that Sir Tim was a total star, choosing to give away the Web rather than try to make oodles of billions from it. Some of us even knew that he contemplated using the GNU GPL for its licence, before being persuaded that placing it in the public domain would help it spread faster. But even I did not know this:

Much government work is done by civil servants emailing Word documents back and forth. Yet Berners-Lee refuses, on principle, to use Word, which is a proprietary rather than an open source format. On one occasion, one official recalled, Berners-Lee received an urgent document in Word from one of the most senior civil servants—and refused to look at it until a junior official had rushed to translate it into an acceptable format.

Seems RMS has some competition in the uncompromising integrity stakes....(Via @timjph.)

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Open Data: A Question of (Panton) Principles

Since I have been banging on about the need for open data in science for some time, you won't be surprised to learn that I am in agreement with the following:

Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.

For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.

By open data in science we mean that it is freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. To this end data related to published science should be explicitly placed in the public domain.

They form the basis of the newly-formalised Panton Principles for open data in science, and are followed by the four short principles themselves - essentially that there should be an explicit statement of what may be done with the data, and that ideally that data should bein the public domain.

The principles derive their name from the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge - destined, perhaps, to pass into science history rather as the Eagle pub did 50 years ago.

But given that provenance, and the fact that 75% of the authors of the Principles are British, it's a shame they couldn't spell the word "licence" properly. Sorry for the nit-picking, but it's a question of, er, principle for me...

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Visualising Open Data

One of the heartening trends in openness recently has been the increasing, if belated, release of non-personal government data around the world. Even the UK is waking up to the fact that transparency is not just good democracy, but is good economics too, since it can stimulate all kinds of innovation based on mashups of the underlying data.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the more such data we have, the harder it is to understand what it means. Fortunately, there is a well-developed branch of computing that tries to deal with this problem: visualisation. That is, turning the reams of ungraspable numbers into striking images that can be taken in at a glance.

Of course, the problem here is that someone has to spend time and effort taking the numbers and turning them into useful visualisations. Enter the Open Knowledge Foundation, which today launches the self-explanatory site “Where Does My Money Go? - analysing and Visualising UK Public Spending” (disclaimer: I have recently joined the OKFN's Advisory Board, but had nothing to do with this latest project.)

Here's what the press release has to say about the new site:

Now more than ever, UK taxpayers will be wondering where public funds are being spent - not least because of the long shadow cast by the financial crisis and last week’s announcements of an estimated £850 billion price tag for bailing out UK banks. Yesterday’s pre-budget report also raises questions about spending cutbacks and how public money is being allocated across different key areas.

However, closing the loop between ordinary citizens and the paper-trail of government receipts is no mean feat. Relevant documents and datasets are scattered around numerous government websites - and, once located, spending figures often require background knowledge to interpret and can be hard put into context. In the UK there is no equivalent to the US Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which requires official bodies to publish figures on spending in a single place. There were proposals for similar legislation in 2007, but these were never approved.

On Friday 11th December the Open Knowledge Foundation will launch a free interactive online tool for showing where UK public spending goes. The Where Does My Money Go? project allows the public to explore data on UK public spending over the past 6 years in an intuitive way using an array of maps, timelines and graphs. By means of the tool, anyone can make sense of information on public spending in ways which were not previously possible.

There's currently a prototype, and a list of the datasets currently analysed available as a Google Docs spreadsheet. There are some really cool interactive visualisations, but I can't point you to any of them because they are hidden within a Flash-based black box – one of the big problems with this benighted technology. Once HTML5 is finalised it will presumably be possible to move everything to this open format, which would be rather more appropriate for a site dedicated to open data.

That notwithstanding, it's great to see the flood of information being tamed in this way; I hope it's the forerunner of many more like it (other than its dependence on Flash, of course) as governments around the world continue to release more of their data hoards. Meanwhile, do take it for a spin and pass on any suggestions you have that might improve it.

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Declaration of Open Government by Australia

The Australian government is emerging as one of the leaders in the sphere of open government. It has now published a draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, entitled "Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0" (hmm, not quite sure about that phraseology). Here's the central recommendation:

A Declaration of Open Government by the Australian Government

Accompanying the Government’s announcement of its policy response to this report, the Australian Government should make a Declaration on Open Government, stating that:

* Public sector information is a national resource and that releasing as much of it on as permissive terms as possible will maximise its economic, social value to Australians and reinforce its contribution to a healthy democracy;

* Using technology to increase collaboration in making policy and providing service will help achieve a more consultative, participatory and transparent government;

* Online engagement by public servants involving robust professional discussion, as part of their duties and/or as private citizens, benefits their agencies, their professional development, those with whom they are engaged and the Australian public. This engagement should be enabled and encouraged;

* The fulfilment of the above at all levels of government is integral to the Government’s objectives including public sector reform, innovation and utilising the national investment in broadband to achieve an informed, connected and democratic community.

What's interesting is that in addition to this strong central declaration in favour of openness, the draft report is peppered throughout with references to "open source"; indeed, the whole thing is permeated by its spirit - which is probably why it is such an inspiring document. Let's hope that other governments are indeed inspired by it, and come out with something similar themselves.

Update: As people in the comments have rightly reminded me, this plan to open up some data is rather negated by the Australian government's moves to censor massively the Internet. Interestingly this schizophrenia mirrors almost exactly that of the UK government.

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Of Government 2.0, Open Source and Open Data

Great to see this in Australian Senator Kate Lundy's big speech "Government 2.0: co-designing a better democracy":

Open source software as an example of another, often less thought of opportunity for open and transparent government is through the tools we choose to use. Software underpins almost everything we do, whether it be for work, play or creative endeavour. To be able to scrutinise software – to see the human readable instructions and trust it has, if you will – becomes almost a democratic issue, for many in the technology community.

...

So we consider that the time is now right to build on our record of fairness and achievement and to take further positive action to ensure that Open Source products are fully and fairly considered throughout government IT; to ensure that we specify our requirements and publish our data in terms of Open Standards; and that we seek the same degree of flexibility in our commercial relationships with proprietary software suppliers as are inherent in the open source world.

There's also good stuff on open data:

as has been evident in the US for many years, open access to government data can dramatically increase the value created from the data both socially and economically. This means the society as a whole benefits from access to the data.
Public sector information ought to be available in the public not just to facilitate innovation in the public and private spheres, but to enable individual citizens to make informed choices.

Just to be clear, I am not talking about personal information that we expect to be private and secure. I am talking about general information about the places we live, the environment we live in, the things we do as a society.
A general policy of openness in this area would create a culture of scrutiny and collaboration rather than a culture of secrecy.

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