Oxford Brookes University Alumni Association lecture on open data in the UK and the possibilities for governemtns and busines

1. Open Data:
Opportunities and challenges for
government and business.
Dr Dan Herbert

2. The ability to collect,
store, analyse and report
data fundamentally affects
the way that organisations
function.

3. Today‘s lecture
• Some background concepts.
• What is open data?
• The data available
• What can be done with it?
• The government – opportunities and challenges
• Business – opportunities and challenges
• Some conclusions…

4. Some Concepts…
• Open source:
• Free beer and free speech
• Software, tools, data
• Licences – GNU, creative commons etc…
• Hackers, developers and script kiddies

5. More concepts…
• The wisdom of crowds
• Why Wikipedia works
• Wikinomics
• The semantic web
• Tagged data
• Linked data

6. Closed data
Organisations have locked up data,
formats and ideas to extract value
from them. Value came from the fact
they controlled them.
But value can come from
sharing….the gold mine…

7. Open data
“Open Data is a philosophy and practice requiring that
certain data are freely available to everyone, without
restrictions from copyright, patents or other
mechanisms of control.”
(opendefinition.org 2011)
Free (as in speech) and Free (as in beer)

8. So what data is available?
• Data.gov.uk • Bus stops
• Mapping data • Train times – this
• Spending data week!
• Contracts • Boris Bikes
• World bank • Etc etc etc…
• Data.eu

9. ‗Unofficial open data‘
• Scraperwiki.org
• Harvesting data from web pages
• A bit naughty….
• But good fun!
• An Example – pool temperatures.

10. What can be done
• Web pages
• Openlylocal
• OpenCharities- a scraped page
• Analysis tools
• Timetric
• Spotlight on Spend
• Armchair Auditor on the Wight

11. What can be done
• Visualistions
• Wheredoesmymoneygo.
• Applications
• Boris Bikes
• Journalism
• Datablog

12. A welcome from the Prime Minister!

13. Government…opportunities
• Accountability
• Many eyes…
• Armchair auditing
• Value for money…
• Effectiveness
• Efficiency
• Economy
• Free services – train times app, boris bikes, etc
• Cheap, agile service developments
• Open street maps

14. Government…challenges
―Those with the power to determine what enters into
organisational accounts have the means to articulate
and diffuse their values and concerns, and
subsequently to monitor, observe and regulate the
actions of those that are now accounted for.‖
(Hopwood, 1984)

15. What do we account for?
• In the past this has been set by experts
• Open data lets anyone aggregate figures
• FOI lets anyone get data
• Institutions need to give context to data
• ―The restaurant bill‖

16. How to create value from government data?
• Sell the data
• Cash gain
• Pirating?
• Free the data
• Wider economic gain

17. Business…opportunities
• Market analysis
• Collection costs are falling
• Competitive data
• Business research
• New market segments
• Using data to provide services
• Co-production
• Sharing data for mutual gain – genome project

18. Business... Challenges
• Some business models are dead!
• CIPFA benchmarking
• Pressure to disclose
• Financial analysis/rating agencies
• If we have it for government and contractors why not
everyone?
• Strategic change: knowledge is less valuable than
the skill to use it.
• Music is less valuable than performers

19. And more…
New ways to link and use data
It‘s data underneath all this. The
more that is open the better!

20. A new age??
• Social media has been the focus but DATA underpins
value.
• The semantic web is emerging based on data
• Location based iPhone apps
• The web of things….

21. A new age?
• The ‗many eyes‘ of the web enable new ways of
working
• Holding power to account
• Creating new models

22. I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable
of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and
transactions between people and computers. A ‗Semantic Web‘,
which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it
does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our
daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The
‗intelligent agents‘ people have touted for ages will finally
materialize.
— Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

23. Benchmarking business at risk
• CIPFA make money collecting and analysing
spending and performance data.
• BUT
• Data collection form is is FOIable
• Anyone can collect and analyse returns.
• That makes the business weak