Open Data

Rufus Pollock
[open knowledge foundation]
[http://www.okfn.org/]

About the Foundation

Founded 2004 / Not-for-profit

Promoting, Creating, Disseminating Open Knowledge

http://www.opendefinition.org/

Open = Freedom to Access / Use / Re-use / Redistribute
(allow attribution and/or share-alike requirement)

The Foundation is a Community

Organized around a set of projects and working groups

Principles: open knowledge, meritocracy and tolerance

Ongoing Information Revolution

'A man has perished and his body has become earth. All his relatives have crumbled to dust. It is writing that makes him remembered.'

The Openness Revolution

The substantial portion of that material will be OPEN

Why?

Open Data: Why?

Every Kind of Data

Transport, Geodata, Statistics, Electoral-Legal ...

(Train times, station locations, spending breakdowns, national laws, ...)

The Holy Trinity:
Innovation, Efficiency, Transparency

AKA: Jobs and Growth, Community and Governance

Information is Special: Non-Rivalrous

Very cheaply copied ~ zero cost

Giving me a 'copy' of your car is a problem, giving me a copy of your data isn't

The Many Minds Principle

The Best Thing to do With Your Data will be Thought of by Someone Else

Fixing is Faster with Open Data
(And You Don't Repeat Yourself)

To many eyes all bugs are shallow

One department can find and use another's data

Scaling
(Closed Data Doesn't Scale!)

We're Weaving Data Together	To Scale We Need to Componentize	But We Need to Put Humpty-Dumpty Together Again - Not Possible if Closed