Experts Chart How To Take Open Knowledge Success To Next Level

The process of opening up data from the public and private sectors has achieved relevant success in recent years, but many challenges are still to be overcome to make data really accessible and usable by the public. These were among the main ideas that emerged from a meeting of open knowledge experts in Geneva yesterday.

The 2013 Open Knowledge Conference, an annual event organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation, aims at understanding existing trends with a specific focus on open data use in new areas and sectors.

In the opening remarks, Rufus Pollock, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation, illustrated the conceptual framework of this year’s conference and the main reasons for opening up data. He explained that open knowledge is an enabling tool aimed at empowering people to act and seek changes through knowledge, data and information. However, releasing data is not enough to produce relevant changes, he said.

“Open knowledge itself doesn’t make the world a better place. I wish open knowledge was a magic potion. Sadly, it is not like that, but open knowledge is an essential ingredient,” Pollock said.

Against this background, experts from international organisations, business and nongovernmental organisations presented a number of successful open knowledge projects, such as open data portals on refugees, open contracting, trans-boundary waters and open legal data.

Ellen Miller – co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organisation promoting grater government openness and transparency – claimed that the open knowledge community is “growing at an impressive rate” and that an increasing number of people are asking open data as a default for governments.

“Open data is a silver bullet to create democratic governments. Without open data we are stuck where we are,” she said.

According to several speakers, administrations are responding to this push for transparency and openness by launching open data portals at the national level. In addition, innovation tools are increasingly deployed at the local level, with initiatives such as open mapping positively affecting everyday life. However, major issues emerge when considering the actual effectiveness of open data tools.

Today, there are “forty-three country level portals and many of them built on open source software, but they need more than a flashy launch,” Miller said. “They must be reliable, accurate and data must be released in a timely fashion. The win is the impact that the data can have.”

However, concerns about the quality of data grow stronger with regard to data released by the private sector.

“Accuracy is a big problem with closed data because there is little downside to lying. Errors often go uncorrected, it’s a black box,” Chris Taggard, co-founder and CEO of OpenCorporates, said during the presentation of a portal on corporate groupings.

According to Taggard, reliable corporate data sets are important to understand actual flows of financial resources, corporate political influence and corporate risks. However, “proprietary datasets are really problematic and present huge gaps,” he said.

Apart from the supply of open data, speakers cast doubt on the use of open knowledge instruments when considering the involvement of potential users.

“Is there more citizen engagement? The answer is no, not yet,” Ellen Miller claimed.

Taggard said, “most people don’t care about ‘open’ even though open data is better for innovation, competition, efficiency, sharing.”

In the same vein, Samuel Lee and Felipe Estefan, both from the World Bank, claimed that most of the process is driven by the supply. “We try to sequence demand after supply; we try to build demand around the data released,” they said.

The World Bank experts pointed to the digital divide between people with access to open data and people who are still offline as a major challenge to inject demand in the supply chain. In illustrating two pilot projects in Kenya and Indonesia, they said that when financial data were shown to the citizens of two villages without internet access, people “immediately felt empowered to see what they could do with the data and found mistakes.”

Finally, challenges arise when dealing with open data legal standards. Several speakers stressed that a common definition of open data is lacking.

“We need to set a standard for what we mean for open data and force governments to adopt it,” Ellen Miller said.

In this regard, Timothy Vollmer from Creative Commons highlighted that some legal principles are emerging on open standards that should minimise restriction and maximise reuse of open data. However, governments and communities are actually utilising a number of different open licences with distinct characteristics.

Vollmer stressed that the proliferation of licences risk creating legal uncertainty, leading to less use or no use at all of open data. Clarifying the legal standards would enable a more efficient use of open data, he said. In this sense, Vollmer identified as an optimal solution to harmonise limitations and exceptions on open data and to advise governments to keep out ‘poison’ clauses “that would kill interoperability” of open data.