8/8/2019 A Chat With Hal Varian on Open Data and Gov 2.0

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RegionalInnovationPoliciesLuigi Reggi’s website

 A Chat with Hal Varian on Open Dataand Gov 2.0Luigi Reggi

Professor Hal Varian - in Italy to meet Minister Sacconi - gives economic

sense to the open data paradigm: Government as data wholesaler and

the public as retailers. He also comments on the recent criticisms of the

US initiatives for open data: “There is enough momentum behind thiseffort, and we will see progress”

Professor Hal Varian is one of my personal idols. As a student, I studied

microeconomics from his famous manual which is used in almost every

University in the world. Recently, I used Microeconomic Analysis again in

my own Economics course at La Sapienza University in Rome, and I

rediscovered the clarity and rigor of this text.

But my life literally changed after reading Information Rules, a

groundbreaking book he wrote with Carl Shapiro in 1999. This book led me

to study innovation and technology and to make the study of innovation a

profession.

Many of you might know he is now Chief Economist at Google, and his

 job is analyzing economic trends by exploiting the potential of Google

Search and the tons of queries people make every day. A very exiting job

indeed. He is certainly the master of web 2.0 data.

Professor Varian is now touring Europe for a series of meetings that will

culminate with the WTO Forum in Geneva tomorrow. Last Thursday he was

over in Rome to meet the Italian Minister of Labour Maurizio Sacconi at a

public meeting organized by the lobbying and media company Reti entitled

 “Web Economy: Internet for economic development”.

How could I have passed up the opportunity of being there and asking him

a couple of questions about open data and gov 2.0?

8/8/2019 A Chat With Hal Varian on Open Data and Gov 2.0

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RegionalInnovationPoliciesLuigi Reggi’s website

Professor Varian, what do you think about this kind of global fever

for open data and Gov 2.0? Is it all hype or does have a future?

I think that this model is very attractive. You can think of the government 

as the wholesaler of data, that puts it up in bulk form. Then this data can

be downloaded, refined and improved for retail and distribution. There are

a lot of reasons to think that that model might be attractive, because the

role that the Government would play would be quite specifically defined:

make the raw data available. Then people can extract from that what 

they want, and polish it, beautify it, crack it and a lot of other things. So

that is a model which I think could be attractive to Italy, the US and the

other Countries. The problem of managing the data from end to end is that it’s very expensive and a very big challenge. The most important step is to

make the data available even if it’s in a raw and unfinished form.

Two days ago, at Gov 2.0 Summit 2010 in Washington DC Ellen

Miller of Sunlight Foundation strongly criticized the availability and

quality of the data published on USAspending.gov and Data.gov. It

seems that this revolution is actually not happening yet.

Well, I think that in the Obama administration, for example, they are

making a lot of more patent data available, FCC (Federal Communications

Commission) data available, and so on. So it is happening, it’s just not as

rapid as one might think, because it’s a difficult problem. But I think 

there’s enough momentum behind this effort, and we will see progress. As

they say "pazienza"! (he laughs).

8/8/2019 A Chat With Hal Varian on Open Data and Gov 2.0

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RegionalInnovationPoliciesLuigi Reggi’s website

Hal Varian with the Italian Minister Maurizio Sacconi speaking at the conference

Web Economy: Internet per economic development . Rome, September 9, 2010.

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