A year in public data, a view from within...

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JAGGEREE/

A year of
public data, a
view from
within...
Dr Chris Thorpe
@jaggeree

A YEAR IN PUBLIC DATA, A VIEW FROM WITHIN...

I wanted to tell you about a year in open data as viewed from within The Guardian


What are we doing in the open data space?

Well in March last year we launched the Open Platform as a beta to developers

And we just lauched it fully last week

It has several parts, one in which developers can take the content of the newspaper as the
raw material for building new businesses


And other parts, such as the politics API where we make the data we have available free
without limitations on use.


And people make lovely things out of this data such as this Voter Power Index for the recent
elections which lets you know how much your vote is worth based on marginality and
constituency size


We also have raw data. Either data our research team sources as part of their work or they
have provided to them.


Which allow our network of developers and visualisers to make important journalistic
visualisations like this one where David McCandless is visually disproving the link the British
National Party always claims between their membership and areas of high ethnicity in the
population.


We also built a World Government Data store which has an API which allows developers to
search across all the world’s data catalogues

TOASTKID/

Free our Data


We have a history in public data, it’s not a new thing for us, this is Charles Arthur

TOASTKID/

March 9th 2006


he’s campaigned for over four years for the UK’s geographical data to be made freely
available

PSD/

March 7th 2009


and almost three years to the day from his initial article we hosted the ﬁrst National Hack the
Government day with Rewired State


For those of you who don’t know, they’re an organisation all about getting developers to
make prototypes which help government to rethink it’s relationship to data and websites,

And they’d love to talk to people who want to do the same thing outside the UK

PSD/


About 70 developers came together and made prototypes at the ﬁrst Rewired State, there
have now been many including one for young people under the age of 16

NIGELPAINE/

Data driven annecdotes


Among the things that was made that day was one of the most important things in getting
the UK public data released.

Apart from Sir Tim himself. It kind of helps to have the founder of the web on the team.


Tom Taylor created a KML ﬁle from data made available by Paul Clarke, then of Direct Gov.

The Times then made this KML into a map

PAUL_CLARKE/


And this powerful example was used as part of Sir Tim’s strong persuasive efforts.


The power of it is clear, over 13000 mentions of something that Tom made in well under a
day

PAUL_CLARKE/

Fast prototypes


The other thing that came out of Rewired State were rapid prototypes that Whitehall staff
found useful for beating down defenses about how long things would take.


For instance I made a faceted API for schools data in under 4 hours from a spreadsheet of
schools data.

BLACKBELTJONES/


And as we know, a few months later the UK government launched data.gov.uk

Co-opting with permission Matt Jones’ exceptional image Get Excited and Make Things.

A mantra for the last year and going forward.


The Cabinet Office asked The Guardian to convene a group of developers from our network
for a few days of hacking and prototype making on the data in the preview to give some more
examples to show the power of what had been released and to get more.


Many things were made, I made something out of schools data.

There’s a pattern here, I have a 3 year old son and many of the government sites about
schools are terrible and not user centric. I’d like to ﬁx that and public data enables that
ﬁxing.

This allows you to see the quality of schools around your location simply and clearly.

SCRAPLAB/


Tom Taylor, Dan Catt and Gavin Bell made the exceptional postcode paper

SCRAPLAB/

Data driven artefacts


All about services around you, a copy of this paper was given to every cabinet minister and
was inﬂuential in getting them to see the value of freeing the geographical data.

HTTP://WWW.INFORMATIONISBEAUTIFUL
.NET/LEFTVRIGHT_US.HTML


Then we had a change of government and there were worries that the data may dry up or the
project stall.

JAGGEREE/

Left Right

Transparency/ Small government
openness
Keeping checks on
“It’s our data” public sector spending
Helping bring level Putting public services
playing field in in private hands
service quality to all
Developing an innovation
Public-private economy with many new
partnerships business owners
Equality in procurement Derive wealth
and tax revenue
Free market economy


But there are both left wing and right wing reasons for public data.

And although I’m more left than right, for me personally, the generation of an app economy
and new services built on data are more compelling than the oft touted transparency beneﬁts

PLAXCOLAB/

Public data is growth media for
an ecosystem to form


Public data is the nutrient of a whole new eco system and allows new things to happen

JAGGEREE/


For example at a recent Rewired State a team of us made a brand new board game about
ﬁlling the knowledge gap that exists in parents to be

JAGGEREE/


A game called The Bump Game which includes cards which are about where you live and
provide deep links into government services about the things you don’t know you need to
know yet


And some of you may have seen the Asborometer, an iPhone app around how many antisocial
banning orders have been issued around you

JAGGEREE/


Or my favourite counter point to it Rupert Reddington’s wonderful Awesomeometer about the
good and cultural things that surround you, made for the Rewired Culture event.


At the same event, I made an iPad app out of an API I’d made for the Government Art
Collection.

It was made as a straw man to get them to provide creative commonsed high resolution
images of publicly owned art works...

It’s working, they’re now starting to do it and I’ll have to ﬁnish the app sometime soon

JAGGEREE/

This changes things...


There are things emerging that will change the public participation space we inhabit around
public data.

I’m not mad enough to believe everyone will own an iPad, but I also don’t think they and the
devices that will follow them are for us geeks.

JAGGEREE/


The people interested in them are not your average Apple fans, they’re older...

iPads are a herald of the era of a simple computer for people who don’t want a computer.

They’re inclusion devices and we need to think of what they’ll do to public service provision.

JAGGEREE/


And app stores such as the Chrome Web App store announced at Google I/O could be used
as a way of disseminating apps made on public data


and even providing revenue for their developers

THOMASHAWK/


I’d like to end with an example of where this is beginning to work and that’s BART in San
Francisco and their real time data.

Real time data is the next place for us to work on government to get it released.

It’s key to building user centric apps which have a business model


Such as all of these iPhone apps, many of them paid ones around BART data.

The evolutionary pressure you see in app stores is often not a race to the bottom on price,
but a race to the top on functionality and useablity...


as you can see here the top iPhone app for BART, iBartLive costs more than the Simpson’s
game.

JAGGEREE/

We’re only at the dawn of it all...


We’re just getting started, but it’s my belief that public data can create new economies,
improve procurement processes and through evolutionary pressure in the marketplace
increase the useability and user centricity of applications that access government services...

We owe it to the consumers of those services to provide an environment where they can get
new and better access to them, mediated by the ingenuity of developers.

JAGGEREE/

Thank you
Dr Chris Thorpe
@jaggeree


Thank you

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