#CODS15: Trends and attitudes in open data

[Summary: sharing slides from talk at Canadian Open Data Summit]

The lovely folks at Open North were kind enough to invite me to give some opening remarks at the Canadian Open Data Summit in Ottawa today. The subject I was set was ‘trends and attitudes in the global open data community’ – and so I tried to pick up on five themes I’ve been observing and reflecting on recently. The slides from my talk are below (or here), and I’ve jotted down a few fragmentary notes that go along with them (and represent some of what I said, and some of what I meant to say [check against delivery etc.]). There’s also a great take on some of the themes I explored, and that developed in the subsequent panel, in the Open Government Podcast recap here.

(These notes are numbered for each of the key frames in the slide deck. You can move horizontally through the deck with the right arrow, or through each section with the down arrow. Hit escape when viewing the deck to get an overview. Or just hit space bar to go through as I did when presenting…)

(1) I’m Tim. I’ve been following the open data field as both a practitioner and a social researcher over the last five years. Much of this work as part of my PhD studies, and through my time as a fellow and affiliate at the Berkman Centre.

(2) First let’s get out the way the ‘trends’ that often get talked about somewhat breathlessly: the rapid growth of open data from niche idea, to part of the policy mainstream. I want to look at five more critical trends, emerging now, and to look at their future.

(3) First trend: the move from engagement with open data to solve problems, to a focus on infrastructure building – and the need to complete a cyclical move back again. Most people I know got interested in open data because of a practical issue, often a political issue, where they wanted data. The data wasn’t there, so they joined action to make it available. This can cycle into ongoing work on building the infrastructure of data needed to solve a problem – but there is a risk that the original problems get lost – and energy goes into infrastructure alone. There is a growing discourse about reconnecting to action. Key is to recognise data as problem solving, and data infrastructure building, as two distinct forms of open data action, complementary, but also in creative tension.

(4) Second trend: there are many forms of open data initiative, and growing data divides. For more on this, see the Open Data Barometer 2015 report, and this comparison of policies across six countries. Canada was up 1 place in the rankings from the first to second editions of the ODB. But that mainly looks at a standard model of doing open data. Too often we’re exporting an idea of open data based on ‘Data Portal + License + Developers & Apps = Open Data Initiative’ – but we need to recognise that there are many different ways to grow an open data initiative, and activity – and to be opening up space for a new wave of innovation, rather than embedding the results of our first years experimentation as the best practice.

(5) Third trend: the Open Data Barometer hints that impact is strongest where there are local initiatives. Urban initiatives? How do we ensure that we’re not designing initiatives that can only achieve impact with a critical mass of developers, community activists and supporting infrastructures.

(6) Fourth trend: There is a growing focus on data standards. We’ve moved beyond ‘Raw Data Now’ to see data publishers thinking about standards on everything from public budgets, to public transit, public contracts and public toilets. But when we recognise that our data is being sliced, diced and cooked, are we thinking about who it is being prepared for? Who is included, and who is excluded? (Remember, Raw Data is an Oxymoron). Even some of the basics of how to do diverse open data are not well resolved right now. How do we do multilingual data for example? Or how do we find measurement standards to assess open data in federal systems? Canada has a role as a well-resourced multi-lingual country in finding good solutions here.

(7) Fifth trend: There are bigger agendas on the policy scene right now than open data. But open data is still a big idea. Open data has been overtaken in many settings by talk of big data, smart cities, data revolutions and the possibility of data-driven governance. In the recent African Data Consensus process, 15 different ‘data communities’ were identified, from land data, and geo-data communities, to health data and conflict data communities. Open data was framed as another ‘data community’. Should we be seeing it this way? Or as an ethic and approach to be brought into all these different thematic areas: a different way of doing data – not another data domain. We need to look to the ideas of commons, and the power to create and collaborate that treating our data as a common resource can unlock. We need to reclaim the politics of open data as an idea that challenges secrecy, and that promotes a foundation for transparency, collaboration and participation. Only with this can we critique these bigger trends with the open data idea – and struggle for a context in which we are not database objects in the systems of the state, but are collaborating, self-determining, sovereign citizens.

(8) Recap & take-aways:

• Embed open data in wider change
• Innovate and experiment with different open data practices
• Build community to unlock the impact of open data
• Include users in shaping open data standards
• Combine problem solving and infrastructure building