Open questions about open data | Public Leaders Network | Guardian Professional

"In the technology world, 'openness!' has long been a battle cry of the underprivileged. It's the language of bottom up freedom against top-downcontrol; of Linux against Microsoft and Wikipedia against Britannica. And now, open government data is the demand of those who would drag government data out from behind locked doors. But the world has changed since Linus Torvalds started his hobby operating system, and now openness is heard from the top as much as the bottom. The past few years have seen new companies, flush with venture capital, invoking openness even as they build centralised, fundamentally closed systems. In January, Coursera and Udacity went to Davos (of all places) to cast themselves as radicals out to disrupt education. Taxi-alternative Uber and apartment-renting AirBnB seek to build billion-dollar businesses while urging us throw off the yoke of local government regulations, taxi cartels and big B&B. This is no longer the 'world turned upside down', it's the world turned right back the way it was, with money on top. Will the open data movement be a force for community-led democratisation or for a new wave of algorithm-driven corporate giants? There are worrying signs of the latter. A recent white paper from CapGemini on unlocking economic value by opening up government and public data highlights Silicon Valley real-estate advertising company Zillow to show the economic benefits of open data. Built on open tax data, county records and home-for-sale listings, Zillow launched a free service last October, listing homes going through the foreclosure process – and also potentially exposing the owners' financial troubles to neighbours and employers. Is this reckless profiteering the democratisation we are looking for? There is no doubt that more government data can usefully come out from Whitehall and local town halls, but we should not to be swept away by the appealing language of openness. There is room for a number of models when providing access, including non-commercial licences, closed partnerships between cities and citizen groups, and the use of non-standard formats for sharing that reflect the quirks of individual cities. Each of these breaks the idea of 'openness' in one way or another, but we should be prepared to do so. Openness itself is not a virtue, and it's time the debate moved beyond it."