OPEN DATA get to know our ant hill

byTon Zijlstra

12 March 2013

For years as a kid and teenager, I was an amateur radio enthusiast, building radios and using them to connect to other people and places. In the photo you see the simplest radio possible: a single piece of wire, just 5 components, and it doesn’t even need a battery.

Once a year I participated in the annual Jamboree On The Air, at a scouting club here in this city Zwolle. It was so exciting, experiencing all those connections, sensing this global network.

As a kid I was already fascinated by how everything could be connected to everything. If only you had the tools, like radio, and ability to actually see it and do it.

In school and elsewhere I was usually told everything had its own place, but the fascination with how everything and everyone could be connected remained. And then the internet and digitization happened. It connected us on an unprecedented scale. And it pushed new tools in to the hands of us as individuals.

Since then I am very interested in what happens when you connect people who were unconnected before, and where new tools reach the hands of individuals. New tools like internet, social media etc, which enable us all to do things better, do it differently, or do things at all. Today I’d like to talk to you about one of those new instruments: Open Data.

I’d like to talk to you about three thingswhat open data is, and how it can be used why our societies need open data, and why YOU want to be involved.

&Whatit is

Howit’s

usedOpen Data is a very versatile thing. It can be used for an enormous variety of purposes and applications. I will show you a few examples.

In Denmark it is open data that drives this website to improve the energy efficiency of your home. It takes open data from government sources, and provides you with a plan specifically for your home, including financing options, and a list of builders who can do the work.

At the same time, Open Data is used to provide people in Kenya with better access to health care and medical information. From identifying symptoms and finding out if your doctor is licensed, to where to get treatment.

cleaning up SloveniaFoto: Slavica Isovska

In Slovenia open data is used to help clean up the country. This map of all illegal dump sites in Slovenia is only possible because of the availability of open data. Groups of citizens use this to plan cleaning up actions.

That are just three random examples of thousands and thousands of applications where open data is being used. So what is this OPEN DATA, that can do all that? Open data is data that was collected, often by governments, for some task or other, and that then is published for everyone to make use of afterwards as well. Open data is public data that is published for all to use freely, without technical, legal or financial barriers. Because of digitization and internet, opening up data has become easy and cheap to do.

open data stimulates innovation

Removing barriers to public data, and allowing others to use it, opens up the low end of markets and opens new areas of activity. That is where innovation starts, that is where new value comes from. Open data allows innovation in unexpected places from unexpected people. That is how open data creates impact.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/5858059202/

And it indeed already has brought visible economic impact around the world. That impact also happens to be the reason the European Union is promoting open government data with laws and regulation: there is a socio-economic potential of 140 Billion Euro’s, or 2% of GDP in Europe.

That 140 Billion will be composed of many different small impacts, by individuals and companies around Europe. It will be composed of work by you and me.

http://datacatalogs.org/group/eu-official

109portalsin Europe

Because of this potential, and because of transparency, governments across Europe are opening up the public data they have. Since the fall of 2009, when the UK government launched their data portal (data.gov.uk), to last month when Germany did the same (govdata.de), over 100 local, regional and national government data portals have been created. This includes the European Commission, and also for instance the Dutch government.

data.overheid.nl

“tackling societal issues with open data”

The Netherlands explicitly connects opening up data to helping solve societal issues. Such as improving socially disadvantaged city neighborhoods, and coping with the impact of regional shrinkage, in regions where people are moving away.

In short, there is an untapped abundance waiting inside government and other organisations, an abundance of data that if made open would be of huge value to society. Data that was collected for 1 task, but as Open Data may prove useful for other things. By opening up we allow those other things to become possible. The process of opening up all of that data has only just started, but in time we will move to the situation where everything that can be made public will be made public by default.

Whysocietyneeds

it

The abundance open data promises is of course great but there is a more compelling reason why our societies really need it. Why it’s not a nice to have but a need to have.

networked society makes ‘open’ a necessity

We live in a networked society, and networks thrive on sharing and openness. Nodes that don’t share don’t exist to the network. You are only connected if you share. Openness is therefore a key aspect of a networked society. That is why you hear not just about open data, but also open access, open source, open knowledge, open manufacturing, open hardware and open design. Open data, is part of the Open Everything that is a necessary feature of a networked society.

OPENdata

openDATAvs

So the key thing in Open Data is not the data, it is the Openness. It is easy to assume that open data is interesting because of the data. After all it is the content of the data that makes applications possible.

Data has been around for a long time, it’s the openness that is important. It is the fact that all of us can have access to open data that is the key thing. That you and I now have access to all that data for our daily tasks and the issues we encounter.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dahlstroms/4905275342/

At the same time our fully networked society, because of all the connections and feed back loops, also creates much more complexity.

Our world has become one giant connected ant hill. Where everything has impact on everything else.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bulldogpottery/5093284259/

Without new tools like Open Data, it is impossible for us as individuals, to understand our world. Much like a single ant has no perception of how its own actions help create the complexity of the ant hill, without tools like Open Data we can have no perception of the complexity of our world.

Open data will help us cope with that complexity.

Opening up data allows us to see complex issues in a different light. And see our environment in new ways. We are for instance accustomed to seeing cities, like this here in Amsterdam, from our own singular perspective. And it tells us little about the city as a whole. It is the perspective of a single ant.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4672179886/

With open data we all get a whole new perspective. This is also Amsterdam, and it shows us where tourists are taking pictures (in red), and where inhabitants do so (in blue). A new insight into places worth seeing and lively parts of town emerges. We all can see the shape of the ant hill.

Open Data in large volumes is different therefore. It’s not just more data for more people, it provides us a completely different perspective on our situation and our issues.

Hans Rosling in his original talk at TED said that we need to better understand our world by recognizing the complex picture that data tells us, and it still holds true. All of us need access to the data of all issues that concern us. We need open data in the hands of everybody to be able to deal with the increased complexity of our daily lives. If a lot of people feel powerless in our complex societies, it is because they lack the tools to act and the tools to understand their environment. Open Data increases our understanding and our ability to act.

If we want to take on poverty, the cost of health care, food safety, the financial system, the economic crisis, ageing and all those other issues we’re facing, we, as individual citizens need a more complete understanding of the connected data. We need that data as OPEN data.

Every ant needs to know in detail how the ant hill works.

Whyyou need

to be involved

And that leads us to why you need to be involved

http://www.flickr.com/photos/taslab/8401390107

Every ant needs to know how the ant hill works.

That is why across the world, groups of interested people are starting to learn to use open data, like in this picture in Bologna. Because developing the skills to use and understand open data is crucial.

Just a few weeks ago was International Open Data Day. In over 100 cities world wide groups of people came together to work on data and create applications. I happened to be in Warsaw that day and joined over 50 Polish people to work on open data.

In the past few years I have visited dozens and dozens of these events. Most of the people you meet there are not traditionally involved with using data. But they see Open Data as an opportunity to solve problems that they face. And they want to learn how to do that.

Networked life, networked work, networked learning

safe to eat

whether it is to find safe restaurants in New York and prevent food poisoning by building an app that tells you how clean a restaurant is you are walking into.

or finding a good parking space in Amsterdam that is cheap and within walking distance from where you need to be.

or figuring out where you can go with a wheel chair in Berlin, by using Wheelmap to see information on accessibility.

and whether it is tracking the connections between every single company in the world

or visualizing how every euro in every government is spent

your problem

new ways

In all these cases, someone had a problem in their own life, small or big, that they wanted to solve, got their hands on the data, and found a new way of solving their problem.

And that is what we all should do. Finding new ways to solve issues you face, using open data. That takes an effort by all of us. An effort to learn how to do this, to acquire the skills we need.

Already there are many free tools out there for you to work with open data to build solutions. To help you program, to help you clean up data, to help you build applications. So you do not need to start from scratch, and you can get started quickly. There’s nothing to hold you back to get started right now.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bulldogpottery/5093284259/

Don’t become an ant, learn to understand the anthill. Get involved. Use Open Data. Understand your world.

Creditsall photos and slides

cc-by Ton Zijlstra

except where sourcementioned on photo

12 March 2013