Today I attended to an interesting event around open data. My expectations were around seeing how governments share their data, who is able to use it and at what extend.
My expectations were not wrong, but there was a plot twist in the end!
Overall, there is a pressure from the population to get good, reliable and current information.
We are not only talking about data analysts, scientists or these kind of people anymore, it is about the couples getting married and need to find a registered religious official (and yes, this is the most downloaded data from Ontario’s data service).
Now that the process of gathering data and providing open data is almost settled, the governmental open data sources are taking the next step by making all those raw data become something digestible, with charts, maps and even storytelling, directly from their source.
The challenges are big, and they worth it, as this is one of the ways to avoid governments to take unilateral decisions, and also promote individuals or companies to work with this data, and in this case, it doesn’t really matter if they are willing to have direct profit out of this.
If I stop my text here, it all makes sense, as we are talking about governments that do it all based on laws*.
Then there was this presentation of a vehicle tracking company, that has more than 3 million sensors installed, and they have a humongous set of information sitting idle there at their servers. They had this big idea, why not turning it a by-product** and open this to the great public, for free? It is not a new idea, and surely Google is the first, but not only, company that already does that successfully.
Why did I consider it as a plot twist? Because I was not expecting it and because they found a way to create value for their company through open data. That intangible asset was passive and now became active, growing their visibility to new and diverse markets that they wouldn’t be able to reach with their core business.
*The fact that it is something that governments must do, doesn’t decrease the value of the teams that perform it. It was amazing to see the excitement of the presenters around their work and around the new challenges they had ahead!
**All concerns regarding to privacy were answered during the presentation and can be explained by the company.