Ignite London - Open Data

Last night I gave my first public talk at Ignite London’s first event. Throughout the evening I was very enlightened by the number of excellent speakers and the topics which they talked about. One thing stood out the most though, and that is what Michelle Baldwin of Pillar Nonprofit Network said, “There are approximately 1200 non-profit organizations in London.” Outstanding right? I think so at least.

I would also like to thank all the organizers and everyone who made this event a remember-able one. Also, a special thanks to Kevin Van Lierop for taking amazing photos including the one above! Additional photos of the event that Kevin has taken can be found on his Flickr account.

A summary of my talk including slides

What is open data? Open data is a philosophy and practice requiring certain sets of data to be made available for free without the restriction of control mechanisms like copyright and patents. These data sets should be made accessible to everyone and in machine readable format like XML.

Everyone believes that Open Data is a new and very disruptive. Well it is NOT! Open data is not new and we have a history of doing open data.

In 1985, a man by the name of Bill James studied baseball statistics. The statistics which he analyzed and studied, he collected them himself from box scores. His analysis of the statistics transformed the way baseball is played today. A team by the name of the Oakland A’s were also formed based on his ideas, theories and conclusions from the analysis he performed. The A’s is a team which outperforms most at the fraction of the cost.

David Eaves did a talk at Gov 2.0 Expo this year. David went into details about Open Government and Baseball. He also talked about Billy James and how he transformed baseball with open data. The video of his talk can be found on YouTube.

The world we live in today is very transparent. This is can be demonstrated with just the use of social media and the ability to find information quickly with searching via Google. Unfortunately, I believe the world needs to become more transparent before we can really move forward on many different levels.

Back in 2007, a colleague of David Eaves was asked to do an analysis of the Greater Toronto Area’s charitable sector. When doing her analysis, she was quite surprised what she had discovered. She had discovered that United Way was not the largest non-profit organization in the Toronto area based on the their earnings from donations. However, there were two others – ICAN and Choson Kallah that were larger then the United Way. From her analysis, she identified numerous organizations being used for acts of fraud and tax ovation schemes which lead to the discovery that the Canadian Federal Government lost approximately 3.2 billion dollars in revenue because of these organizations. This 3.2 billion dollars is approximately 0.4% of the Canadian Federal Budget writ large.

The entire case study on of this can be found on David Eaves blog – How Open Data saved Canada $3.2 billion.

Open Data and education is a force not to be reckoned with. I believe London to be a City of education as we have two large post-secondary institutions here:

If institutions like these could and would get behind the idea of Open Data and realize that it is a movement which is a great asset to themselves and their students – I believe a few things would be results of that:

  • Students would gain a real world experience and knowledge while working with this data
  • Students would be able not only to help build a real portfolio, but also help contribute to the community
  • Students would be left with feeling engaged and empowered all at the same time while providing useful analysis and apps to citizens and government

Recently, I have written an article titled “An Open Data and Education thought which has expressed my ideas and thoughts around the combination of education and Open Data.

And finally, Open Data London. We are a group of citizens and activists advancing the cause of Open Data in London, Ontario. If you are looking to gain more information and updates from us – please feel free to sign up at www.opendatalondon.ca. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.