Open Data – First Night

It’s a warmish night in Manahattan after the opening (delicious) dinner of the Open Data 2007 Conference. It’s a spiffy afair. Those Reuters people have such a nice place.

And in the spirit of open data, here is a picture of Seth which I openly grabbed from David Henderson’s Flickr stream. (David and I will work out a royal payment schedule tomorrow at breakfast…)

All Opendata photos on Flickr

The evening kicked off with a welcome from Seth Goldstein who then turned it over to Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters. Not the company I would have expected to be interested in “Open”, but he gave a great overview of how Reuters has a vested interest in this issue and are not de-facto against open data.

But the meat of the evening was the following discussion. I can’t remember who said what, so these are just hilites of the topics that were mentioned. (And that I found interesting…)

• A New York Times article about how young people don’t care anymore about who gets “credit” for content produced.
• Exposing the infrastructer of systems, the inner data-workings, is a good thing. Like postmodern principles, like in architecture where you reveal all the pipes and plumbing and wires.
• Privacy is (or may be?) a new concept in human history. For most of our exisitence we’ve been in small communities where everyone knows everyone.
• We may be experiencing a demographic shift, where the younger generation doesn’t care about privacy so much.
• Tom Glocer is looking forward to the time in 10 or so years where the first senator or supreme court justice has to answer questions about why their MySpace profile in 2007 listed their interests as “Arctic Monkeys and smoking reefers”.
• The human side of exposing so much information, and users growing comfortable with that. [See Love in the information age]
• Time lag is important. Often data is closed at first, but then made open. [This is key. I recall a killer article by David Brin in the 90’s about encryption, and how in the future the only data you will be able to charge for is time-sensitive data.] [David Cancel of Compete.com mentioned to be before dinner about a company that does trading on data so real-time that the speed of light is important in the design of their system. Now that’s time-sensitive!!]
• Do we (the consumers, the data publishers) need something like the GPL where we licence our data and how it can be used? Often our “open data” is crawled, processed, and then sold for a lot of money.
• An individual’s data is worth maybe –what?– 20 cents? At what scale will the users demand payment?
• Will the users form a union to demand payment? [See my post on the subject]
• Social connection data is very valuable, but some of the most closed off data. (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc… guard this data fiercely.)
• Club Penguin is basically a kid’s introduction to social networks.

My thoughts which I didn’t [find the right place / get up the nerve] to add at the time:

• At what scale does data become own-able? Can I demand payment if someone uses a paragraph of mine, a sentence? A 16×16 pixel square of one of my photos?
• People are some of the most unpredictable entities around. All of this data helps us to understand them. To make them predictable. Almost all the data we’re talking about is people-data…we’re talking about geologic or weather data!

Conference starts tomorrow at 7:30am … Tim W. Time for bed!