Containers, Facebook, Baseball & the Dark Matter around Open Data (#IOGDC keynote) | eaves.ca

“... as we talk about technology and how to do open data we risk missing the real point of the whole exercise - which is about use and impacts... I want to share three stories that highlight the challenges, I believe, we should be talking about... Challenge 1: Scale Open Data... when it comes to open data, the number of open data sets that gets published is no longer the critical metric. Nor is the number of open data portals. We've won... I want to be clear - this is not to say that more open data sets and more open data portals are not important or valuable - from a policy and programmatic perspective more is much, much better. What I am saying is that having more isn't going to shift the conversation about open data any more. This is especially true if data continues to require large amounts of work and time for people to unpack and understanding it over and over again across every portal. In other words, what IS going to count, is how many standardized open data sets get created. This is what we SHOULD be measuring... Challenge 2: Learn from Facebook... One of the things I find most interesting about Facebook is ... how the core technology that made it possible was not particularly new. It wasn't that Zuckerberg leveraged some new code or invented a new, better coding language. Rather it was that he accomplished a brilliant social hack... more specifically, young people who'd grown up with internet access were willing to do things and imagine using online tools in ways those who had not grown up with those tools wouldn't or couldn't... My point here is that, while it is still early, I'm hoping we'll soon have the beginnings of a cohort of public servants who've ‘grown up data...’ [who] have matured in a period where open data has been an assumption, not a novelty. My hope and suspicion is that this generation of public servants are going to think about Open Data very differently than many of us do. Most importantly, I'm hoping they'll spur a discussion about how to use open data - not just to share information with the public - but to drive policy objectives... Challenge 3: The Culture and Innovation Challenge... we can't expect that we are going to go from open portal today to better decisions tomorrow. There is a good chance that some of the ideas data causes us to think will be so radical and challenging that either the ideas, the people who champion them, or both, could get marginalized... So what are we going to do to ensure that the culture of government is one that embraces the challenges to our thinking and assumptions... This is a critical challenge for us - and it is much, much bigger than open data... Conclusion: Focus on the Dark Matter ... Do you remember the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? The one... that the characters were all excited about... It's called a MacGuffin... the object in a story that all the characters are obsessed about, but that you - the audience - never find out what it is, and frankly, really isn't that important to you... Open Data Portals are our MacGuffin device. We seem to care A LOT about them. But trust me, what really matters is everything that can happens around them... We're here because we believe that the things open data can let us and others do, matter. The Open Data portal was only ever a MacGuffin device - something that focused our attention and helped drive action so that we could do the other things - that dark matter that lies all around the MacGuffin device... Right now, the debate around open data risks become too much like a Pulp Fiction conference in which all the panels talk about the briefcase. Instead we should be talking more and more about all the action - the dark matter - taking place around the briefcase... In other words, I want to be talking about how open data can make the world a better place, not about how we do open data...”