Open Data, la Conférence, openning up non-personal date and new use

Pr. Nigel Shadbolt: “OGD 2.0 is the next step towards the Open Data Movement”

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton; he is the founding father of Open Data in England. Pr. Shadbolt speaks about the role of Open Data in transparency between government and citizens.

How Open Data can modify the relation between the representative institutions and its citizens?

It modifies it in many ways - but fundamentally it enables a more transparent and accountable relation between those that govern and citizens.

It enables citizens to express their preferences and priorities with respect to the topics of the data whether it is spending or crime rates, educational attainment or hospital infection rates.

 

It allows citizens to provide much better information directly then is held by officials - crowd sourced civic data. Through these and other benefits it enhances participation.

 

According to you, what is the next step in the Open Data movement?

The move towards OGD 2.0 - so that citizens can become contributors of data. But also it is vital that public institutions publish data that matters and that will hold the public sector accountable.

If you should summarize Open Data, its philosophy and its consequences, in one word, what would it be?

Empowerment

 

 

 

Primavera De Filippi : "An opportunity, for the public sector, to reestablish the confidence between administration and citizens"

Primavera De Filippi is an associate researcher at the CERSA, a legal expert at Creative Common France and the public domain workgroup coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

What are the main concerns about Open Data ?

The July 17th, 1978 law (CADA) creates a frame for access and reutilization of public data.Since 2005, this law has created a right to reuse public data, by fixing the conditions of this right. However, this text causes problems that should be taken account of :

• Une portée limitée :
  • The publication is mandatory only for a certain type of documents (mainly legal ones). For the other kinds, a request procedure is necessary.
• Some exceptions to the general rule of data opening
  • There's, in the law, a limited number of exceptions, concerning for example :
    • data which could attempt to private life
    • data covered by secret
    • Information on which third parties have a right of intellectual propriety
    • Information produced or received during an industrial and commercial public service mission
  • Although teaching and research institution, along with cultural services, are not excluded of the general principle of public data reuse (as recently confirmed by the administrative appeal court of Lyon on July 4th, 2012), those institutions can impose conditions on the reuse of their data (Article 11 of CADA law).
• A legal incertitude, especially concerning :
  • the digitalization of public domain pieces which, because of moral rights, could avoid the general regime of the law, thanks to article 10 of the law
  • copyright from public agents, which are conceded only when "it's necessary for the accomplishment of a public mission service". It excludes, de facto, the reuse by a third-party
• Several licences systems :
  • The law enforcement needs a license. Despite the introduction of a reference licence (the Open Licence of Etalab), there is actually several licence's systems (APIE, Creative Commons, ODbl, etc.) which can limit the data reuse by their incompatibility.

What importance is given by the CERSA, and more generally by social sciences, to Open Data or Open Knowledge movements ?

The CERSA (Administrative and Politic Science research center) is teaching and researching center of the CNRS, associated to the University of Paris 2. With the creation of an e-government departement, the CERSA wants to study deep mutations of administrations, local governments et society in the digital age -- especially the content and data opening movements.

Since 2004, the CERSA hosts the french chpater of Creative Commons, which aims to promote free content licences as a soft law complement to the traditional copyright.More recently, the ethic commitee of the CNRS has created a workgroup on DataSharing, to elaborate a recommandation on data access and sharing, a recommandation which will be applying to all the subjects at the CNRS, included social sciences.

If you should resume Open Data, its philosophy and its consequences, in one word, what would it be ?

Opportunity:

• for more transparency : an opportunity for the public sector to reestablish the confidence between administration and citizens, and to reinforce the citizens' participation
• to encourage innovation : an opportunity for local governments to realise economies without neglecting innovation, by developping new organization's models allowing third-parties to propose new services for the citizens : innovating, interactive and personalized services
• to promote cooperation : an opportunity to develop cooperation instead of competition : by promoting a cooperation system between public sector, private sector and society.

 

 

Kevin Hauswirth : "City data does not belong to the City, it belongs to the people"

As one of the closest advisors and social media director of Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago, Kevin Hauswirth leads the Open Data movement in one of the biggest cities in USA.

What are the main initiatives taken by the City of Chicago concerning Open Data ?

The City of Chicago’s data portal (data.cityofchicago.org) has more than 350 data sets that have been viewed more than 1.6 million times, including crime data from 2001, line-by-line budget appropriations, food inspections, visualizations of open spaces and city service requests.

The City’s Performance Dashboards also allow the public to track how efficiently city services are being delivered, from garbage pick-up to graffiti removal. During the winter, our open data empowered independent developers to create applications that helped Chicagoans better navigate the city.

How can Open Data improve the citizens’ life into the city ?

City data does not belong to the City, it belongs to the people. Open Data makes this information available to everyone, from the engaged resident to the application developer.

At the core, making documents more publicly available empowers the people to make more informed, educated assessments of decisions made by leaders. However, a large amount of Chicago’s data is spatial, it’s about places. This is the foundation for all sorts of innovative applications that can allow people to better interact with, explore and experience the Chicago help us connect with each other.

If you should summarize Open Data, its philosophy, its consequences, in one word, which one would it be ?

Accoutability

 

Patrick Ropert : "Open Data is an amazing leverage for innovation"

Since a few months, the SNCF (French Public Railroad Company) has started to release public data. Considering its numerous actions - opening the data.sncf.com portal, launching the OpenApp competition - the SNCF is a pioneer the French Open Data universe. Patrick Ropert, Communication Director at SNCF, talks with us about the importance of Open Data for the company.

How does the SNCF evaluate the relevance and the eventual risks of data release ?

It's an excellent incentive for skilled developers to transform our data in mobile and web applications, which are useful for everyone.

Open Data is an amazing leverage for innovation, to answer our customers' needs.

The SNCF has decided to open the way, firstly by participating to the creation of the White Book on Open Data, then by creating a portal (data.sncf.com) to stay aware of developers' expectations and put our data at their disposal in the best conditions possible. Other initiatives are emerging in parallel, such as our applications contest organized by SNCF Transilien, where more than 2000 apps ideas appeared, and the firsts Hack Days.

What's the influence of Open Data in the perception and the image of the SNCF by its customers ?

SNCF is one of the first mobility and logistic group in the world, and intend to remain one of them. To do this, the company searches ideas and experts where they are : on the Internet, with Labs, in mobility-specialized startups, with Ecomobilité Ventures, at the Camping, the cluster installed in the Paris stock exchange, where we already spotted great ideas.

Open Data takes us one step ahead. The dialogue with developers allows us to find and clarify new ideas for innovating applications, useful for our customers, profitable for the creators and marketable for our brand.

We're initating an Open Data model where everyone gets satisfied, which contribute to promote the SNCF.

If you should summarize Open Data, its philosophy, its consequences, in one word, which one would it be ?

Allowing the ecosystem to cross our data with other ones to create unexpected services: that's the goal of SNCF's Open Data.

 

Open Data throughout the world

Health, education, government and parliamentary activities, industry, transport. Examples are numerous and countries as diverse as the United States, Germany, Kenya and Quebec are already in the opening.

When we look at the Open Data projects in the world we realize that countries of all sizes are getting into: we go from UK to Kenya, from Mexico to Germany... All sectors are concerned by these projects. Some examples will help illustrate this statement.

The application Sandbag Emissions Map, developed in the UK allows you to view CO2 emissions from factories in Europe [Link http://www.sandbag.org.uk/maps/emissionsmap/].

Bepart is a mobile application that identifies the German public buildings under construction, with the possibility to track project progress or to report a problem. Bepart received the first prize in the Open Data Challenge 2011. [http://be-part.info/]

In the U.S., the application « Sunlight Health » [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sunlight-health/id447887452?mt=8&ls=1] compiles data from treatment centers to help patients make better decisions.

Mexico has often been cited as an example for its data release policy. The application « Subsidos al Campo » [http://www.subsidiosalcampo.org.mx/index.html/] allows to verify the use made ​​of the different agricultural subsidies.

Finally, Kenya perceives OpenData as a real opportunity for less developed countries, as evidenced by the opening of the Kenya Open Data web portal [http://opendata.go.ke]./span>

 

The new face of data.gov.uk

The new Open Data B    ritish portal is richer, research are easier and an already-released applications library is available.

Opened since 2009, data.gov.uk just got an important lifting. This website offers open data but also linked data. At the beginning, the website offered access to 2500 datasets, there's more than 8000 today, released by several public institution, like the  Office for National Statistics, the Ordnance Survey or le Cabinet Office. The labeling and the data's description have been improved, so everyone can find quickly relevant data and consult them.

The search engine and the browsing system have been improved, data previews are available and the information about every dataset was enlarged. For example, there's now information of relevance or data rating on a scale from 1 to 5.The ergonomics improvements are huge. 

Next to those updates, it's important to underline the publication of the new white book on Open Data Strategy.  [http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/open-data-white-paper-unleashing-potential ]  and several studies on the topic all over the country. 

 

Create new tools, new services

140 billions of estimated profits for all the European Union countries, by developping new services and applications using public sector's data

Public sector's data is the most important information ressource in Europe. It's produced and collected by public organisms, and gives access to digital, meteorological, juridical, financial, ecnomical maps, among others things. Most of this data could be reuse or included in new products and services that we use on a daily base, such as GPS, weather reports, financial systems.

By reusing this public sector's data, we could offer applications, innovative uses. By gathering information from different sources, new services, business related or not, will be available. Even European Union considers that this data has a great economical potential.

A Vickery study published in late 2011 [http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/docs/pdfs/report/psi_final_version_formatted.docx  ] shows that direct and indirect estimated profits would be around 140 billions euros in the European Union. The reuse of public data allows new companies, employment increase and gives consumers more choice and applications.

 

Peter Murray-Rust : "The Net is our main defence against the creeping corporatism and apathy of modern "democracies"

Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist researcher at the University of Cambridge. As a scientist, he actively campaigns for strong Open Data policies in science. He also is on the advisor board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

How Open Data can modify the current way of « doing » science, the actual epistemologic paradigm ?

My discipline of chemistry is a good central pragmatic science, where there is relatively little philosophical discussion. Modern biology is also highly reductionist and I suspect much medicine, materials science, earth and environmental science is similar. I will exclude modern physics where multiverses and similar concepts are constrained by theory rather than data. Thus although I fully support Dirac ("it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.") most science is not at this level.

Most science is base on a concept of shared truth and most of the scientists above believe that this has some tangible reality, represented by data. [I also exclude shared materials such as specimens, samples - which are also out of scope]. In the more physical sciences there is a belief that a given experiment can be replicated to provide the same data - if not then either the observation is flawed or the experiment does not address a single truth. Without data we are limited in how we share truth. In many cases we have to take the word of the scientist, which is a non-objective way of doing science. Apart from fraud, and sloppiness there is also unmeasured variation. And, without the data, we are unconsciously importing the values of the other scientist.

But there is also a growing realisation that we can, in principle, have access to all the world's scientific data. This creates a new type of scientist - the data-scientist. Tony Hey has popularised Jim Gray's "the Fourth Paradigm" to describe data-driven science. The principle of using other work is, of course, not new and goes back at least to Kepler. But the scale of possibilities changes this qualitatively - everyone can and should be, in part, a data-scientist. It is no longer acceptable not to know what machines can know.

But the practice of holding on to data for personal or institutional gain is still very strong, aided by laziness in publishing data. Despite the term "data deluge" there is an Open Data drought in many areas. Computational chemistry and materials probably consumes >> 1 billion EUR /year but almost none of the raw data is published although it's trivial by HEP standards - much would probably fit on a modern laptop. Therefore until everyone has access to the world's shared knowledge we are still working in the twentieth century.

The primary check on truth is therefore data.

How can the Open Knowledge movement (and, in general, Open Data) be a vector of democratization of science ?

We are in the middle of a titanic struggle between Openness and ( Closed + Apathy). If one wins it will survive for the rest of this century. But if we lose the freedom of the Net (e.g. HADOPI) we move to a dystopia similar to Orwell's 1984. Knowledge is the key component as openness is based on the power of knowledge. The recent EP vote against ACTA was a critical battle for Openness and its success was based on Net democracy / neutrality. The Net is our main defence against the creeping corporatism and apathy of modern "democracies" - we can find like-minded people, move rapidly and develop our resources communally while remaining within the law.

Open Data from government is extremely powerful. It's been very refreshing to see how governments *wish* to share data. Indeed they are often ahead of science in their technology and protocols.

In science we have several problems. Universities and public research labs are conservative and have failed to react to possibilities of change. Many have allowed their knowledge to be appropriated by commercial interests such as publishers and for the most part they don't care. They have huge amounts of public funding (I calculate that 100-1000 Billion USD is spent each year on public STM research). They have little effective drive to share anything as their primary purpose is to compete against each other

So in the open movement we have to create approaches to destabilise this dystopia. I see Open Data and Open Software as liberating - I call my own software "liberation software" as it is designed to break down walled gardens by showing the value of communal data. The good news is that this type of approach is emerging in many places and is undoubtedly a "bottom-up" movement - people are sick of many current practices and believe that science will be better, faster, more productive and more valuable if Open.

If you’d summarize Open Data, its philosophy, its consequences, in one word, what would it be?

Freedom.

(Free-as-in-speech, of course)

 

IMPORTANT : New Location for Open Data la Conference

We're pleased to announce that Open Data la Conference will now take place at the Centre Pierre Mendès France, in Paris, instead of Deauville. The Centre Pierre Mendès France is the conference center of the Ministry of Finances, Economy and Budget.

The conference will be opened by Mr. Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of Industrial Renewal, and closed by Mrs. Fleur Pellerin, Minister for Small and Medium Entreprises, Innovation and the Digital Economy. 

For any further information, please visit the Useful Infos page.

Joao Holanda : "Citizens want to have the ability to influence and take part to the decision process"

João Batista de Holanda Neto is head of Development Office, in charge of Legislative and National Budget Systems, for the Senate of Brazil. Directly responsible for the Brazilian Senate Open Data Portal. During the conference, he'll speak about the brazilian experience on Open Data and the political perspectives allowed by it.

How does Open Data modify the relation between a representative institution and the citizen?

In the last years there have been diverse initiatives in Brazilian legislative trying to establish direct communication channels with citizens. There is nothing wrong with these initiatives, but, despite some innovative experiences, they usually don’t address the central issue: representative democracy as we know is in crisis.

We need to recognize that citizens not only want to be informed about decisions that were already taken or even opinions of their representatives on different themes. Do they want to know how much those institutions cost? How do we spend their money? No doubt! But this is only part of truth.

Citizens want to know why, when and how decisions are taken. Not only to be informed, but to have the ability to influence and take part of decision process. To accomplish that, they want to know what we know! For that reason, begin to emerge in Europe and in the Americas several initiatives like RegardsCitoyen.org in France, Sunlight Foundation in US and Transparência Hacker in Brazil.

This demands us an honest and courageous attitude that, not a few times, will cause us some embarrassment. But it is necessary to establish a new level of relationship with society in general and citizens in particular. Our traditional understanding of democracy is not the end of history: we need to reinvent it together for the next generations.

What are the real applications of the Open Data policy led by the Brazilian Senate?

Open data is not completely new for us. Since 2001, we have and outstanding experience to promote transparency in public spending: Siga Brasil, which gathers data from different government agencies to build a database freely accessible by anyone in the Internet.

It´s based upon a tool which allows searching using different criteria, selecting fields, sorting results and exporting it to different formats. This experience led us to propose a version to states, which will be known as Siga Estados.

We have a Legislative Open Data Portal, based on CKAN, which not only offers a large number of datasets on XML but also web services based on REST API, and, later this year, the same tool offered with Siga Brasil, to allow citizens to filter, sort, print and export data returned by search. This portal is part of a strategy to offer the same set of data to download, searching and browsing, based on open APIs and open formats.

If you’d summarize Open Data, its philosophy, its consequences, in one word, what would it be?

Innovation!

Many words have come to my mind: freedom, transparency or reuse immediately. Communion, in the sense of “the act of sharing, or holding in common; participation” also appealed to me. But, as important as they are, they are different facets of open data.

Innovation comes from the latin word “nova”, which means new. Open data means a new perspective to data, in which people are free to combine different sets of data to explore new ideas, create new products and services, and a challenge to institutions reinvent themselves and rethink their relationship with citizenship. Open data also mean an opportunity to society build new forms of participation and civil engagement.

 

Nigel Shadbolt, the founding father of Open Data in England

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artifical Intelligence at the University of Southampton. He's at the head of the Web and Internet Science Group, director of the Web Science Trust and the Web Foundation.

Nigel Shadbolt was appointed Information Advisor to the English Government in 2009, along with Sir Tim Berners Lee. Their mission: start the data revolution in England. To do so, he's gonna lead the development of the data.gov.uk platform, acknowledge as a pioneer concerning Open Data.

In 2010, Nigel Shadbolt was nominated at the Public Sector Transparency Board. Continuing his contribution to Open Data, he was in charge of the setting up of Open Data standards in public sector and the development of the Right to Data.

In order to develop Open Data, he's also the director of the Local Data Panel, which aims to promote and develop the link between local governance and Open Data.

Professor Shadbolt will honor us with his presence among us for our conference, where he will declaim the closing speech