An Open World?
Alex@oreilly.com

@digiphile

radar.oreilly.com/alexh
We spread the knowledge of
innovators around the world.
"The future is
here.

It's just not
evenly
distributed yet."
What is the
 power of
  open?
In the 1990s, governments and civil
society spread the Internet globally
In the 2000s, mobile phones and social
  networking connected us ever more
In the 2010s, big data will change
        everything again.




     Image Credit: Real Time Rome from Senseable.MIT.edu
Open source software
New York Senate




     NY Senate on iTunes
Open Mapping
Platforms for citizens to self-organize




               Image Credit: ITO World
An expanding number of data sources
Social data and crisis data
Open Data




 Graphic Credit: Justin Grimes
First Principles
“A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free
 to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at
 most, to the requirement to attribute and share-
 alike.” OpenDefinition.org

“Records shared with the public digitally, over the
  Internet, in a way that promotes analysis & reuse.”
  -OpenGovData.org
Open government data platforms
Open data allows citizens to be
   generative in new ways
HHS Community Health Data
“Traffic on the NYC Health Department’s
restaurant inspection site has gone from
10,000 hits per month to 124,000”

                      - New York Times
Fauxpen Data
In an age of “openwashing”…

We need to:

Evaluate licenses.

Peruse the Terms of Service.

Review the governance.

Look at community.

Check the format.
“If Stage 1 of data journalism was “find and
   scrape data,” then…

  Stage 2 was “ask government agencies to
  release data” in easy to use formats.

  Stage 3 is going to be “make your own
  data”, and those sources of data are going to
  be automated and updated in real-time.”

                      -JavaunMoradi, NPR
#SnowPocalypse
Snowmageddon
Chicago Shovels
Open Innovation
Top Coder
Solar Flares and Innocentive
Crowdsourcing?
Citizensourcing
Open Journalism
What does Open Journalism look like?

 “A man dies at the heart of a protest: a reporter
 wants to discover the truth.

 A journalist is seeking to contact anyone who can
 explain how another victim died while being
 restrained on a plane.

 A newsroom has to digest 400,000 official
 documents released simultaneously.”
                         -Alan Rusbridger
The
stream
“Data-driven journalism is the future”




         Source: Tim Berners-Lee in the Guardian
“Trendy but not new”-Simon
     Rogers, Guardian
“We used to call it CAR”-DeBarros




         Bob Woodward, via Cliff1066
Now it’s “Hacks and Hackers”




Photo by Dennis Crowley, from “Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer”
“Newspapers are either going
  to start doing what we do, or
  they're going to be bypassed
  and out of date.”

-Elliot Jaspin

  That was 1986, in Time.
More than 166 U.S. newspapers have stopped
 putting out a print edition or closed down
 altogether since 2008.

There have been more than 35,000 job losses or
  buyouts in the newspaper industry since 2007.

                          Source: Paper Cuts
“Make small things faster, make big things
           possible.”-Derek Willis, NYT




TimesMachine.nytimes.com cost a few hundred dollars. Hosted on Amazon EC2.
Storytelling still matters.
“We use these tools to find and tell stories.
 We use them like we use a telephone.
 The story is still the thing.”

     - Anthony DeBarros
           USA Today



                         Source: Data Journalism and the Big Picture
Source: How Canada became an open data and data journalism powerhouse
More than 36 interactive databases published
Data sets account for 75% of overall traffic
                           [Source: CJR]
Data journalists, meet civic hackers




              Source: BuzzData
Homicide Watch
What’s next?
The future is mobile.
In 2010, 82% of
Americans have a
cellphone.

60% of American
adults go online
wirelessly.

Source: Pew
Internet
Pervasive connectivity




       Image Credit: PetitInvention
Makers and open source hardware
Citizens as Sensors: Andhra Pradesh
Safecast
 open source

 Geiger counter
"The transparency genie is out of the bottle —
  world wide — and it's not going back into the
  darkness of that lantern ever again.

Progress will be slow, but it will be progress.”

                       - Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation
Privacy
challenges
Transparency is not enough
Data illiteracy is leading to a
 new data divide.

Risk: open data empowers
  the empowered.




                                  Illustration: Brock Davis
Bridge the
data divide




              Digital signage on the cheap
Co-create a stronger union
Find me:
Alex@oreilly.com

@digiphile

radar.oreilly.com/alexh

Moldova Open Data Journalism Workshop