Open Data and Data Driven Journalism

Open Data and Data Driven Journalism European Journalism Centre th 24 August 2010 Jonathan Gray The Open Knowledge Foundation

From books to bits...

Digital technologies have the potential to radically transform the way that knowledge is disseminated in our society.

But we still have a long way to go … - the shadow of the print press - datasets are to illustrate reports - publishing without reuse in mind - culture of asking permission - vast information silos - non-machine readable formats - broken links, vanishing content

Where are we going?

An ecosystem of open data: - small pieces, loosely joined - easy to reuse, easy to recombine - lots of contributors / maintainers - distributed, decentralised - divide and conquer - innovation / unexpected reuse - iterative, versioned, 'wiki'-like - learning from open source

From legal uncertainty...

… to legal clarity.

Open data: free for anyone to reuse or redistribute for any purpose

What does this mean for journalism?

Making the news: - finding new stories from datasets - bigger picture by linking datasets - more pairs of eyes to spot patterns - harnessing more external expertise - analysing data behind the stories - responding to interest from public - putting stories into context - publishing datasets with stories

Spreading the news: - visually representing information - demand-driven delivery - datasets for others to reuse - enabling users to comment/flag - integration with other services - connecting data to stories

What can journalists and media organisations do?

1. Publish data using an open license

2. Work with existing communities

3. Use and support existing initiatives and technologies

4. Keep innovating!

jonathan.gray@okfn.org http://twitter.com/jwyg http://identi.ca/jwyg

Image credits Work with schools by New York Public Library Images by Otto Neurath and the Isotype Institute from Fulltable Pierre Vivant's Traffic Light Tree by William Warby The Green Light by Ted Percival Lego Bricks by bdesham These slides are available under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike License. While most images are available under an open license (see above) some are used for illustrative purposes and rights may be reserved by their creators.

http://openbase.pl	268
http://www.tiagodoria.ig.com.br	146
http://blog.okfn.org	89
http://blogold.okfn.org	1

Open Data and Data Driven Journalism

by Jonathan Gray on Aug 22, 2010

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Open Data and Data Driven Journalism — Presentation Transcript