Open Data – Tough Decisions

by Stephen Hilton on July 28, 2010 · View Comments

Today was the closing date for submissions to the Bristol B-Open competition and I am delighted to hear that we have had 11+ proposals for innovative open data projects from Bristol companies. The expert panel (and me) will be shortlisting over the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed we will be able to commission 3 really good ideas!

I only returned from leave on Monday and I was interested to get an update from Mark N (our open data project manager) about the requests for council data that we had received during the application process. It seems that not all council colleages share Councillor Mark Wright’s view that “Bristol City Council only has two forms of data – that which is confidential and that which can be shared”. We have other categories of data – “that which we sell” and “that which is expensive to collect and therefore we can’t just give away”! It is easy to dismiss then latter argument (whose money is it anyway…) but I have been troubled by the former arguement.

The example I was given relates to traffic accident hotspots. We had a request for this data but Mark was told that we could not just give it away as the Council sells it. My own view is that BCC has some sort of ‘moral’ responsibility to make this data available even if it means relinquishing an income stream, but in these austere times, I wonder what other people think… should the council (and Government) maximisize the revenue that might be gained from selling data, or should we give it away on the basis that we can encourage use for the greater good? #opendata #beopen  Any views?

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  • Toby
    The point of the public sector is to perform functions which are beneficial to society and which would not happen in the private sector. If things generate sustaining profits then they do not need to be done by government.

    Once something has been deemed worth doing in the public sector, the benefit to society should be maximised and clawing back small change by data charging may actually reduce the total good data can do. If the process of delivering data had costs then it would be fair to charge for those but with data and the internet the marginal distribution costs should be close to negligible.

    As with other things there can be a long tail on the uses of data and the greatest return may be in the area under the curve which would be cut off by charging. The users may be commercial or not but society loses (see the Clay Shirky TED talk on institutions http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html). Commercial uses also generate tax revenue so the public sector gets payback anyway for commercial use.

    There are also issues about the efficiency of charging for data and whether there are monopoly issues if the government is the only possible provider of data.
  • Kevin
    Without knowing the revenue that particular datasets bring in its hard to make a judgement as to whether on balance its better to restrict and sell them or to open them up. Perhaps in the event that there is commercial value to a dataset then the price paid for it should be openly published?

    Anyone who is interested in how Authorities are responding to calls for more Open Data might want to visit http://openlylocal.com/councils/open
  • Ian Anderson
    My concern is not that access to certain data sets may cost money but that innovation can be blocked by inflexible business models. For example, charging a large flat fee for unlimited access to a specific data set might be appropriate for some applications but not for others. It might be that a valuable use of the data results in the creation of an application targeted at a low volume of users. A high data cost may block the viability of doing this. So to summarise, I would accept charging for access to data sets but I believe that this it is essential that flexible business models (pricing options) are created.
  • Two things spring to mind here. First off, you can easily give away data for non-commercial use only, and still ask for money from those who themselves make money from it.

    Secondly, some sorts of data are ethically different from others. I'm not sure I like the idea of accident blackspots, which are after all a matter of life and death, being kept secret from those who don't pay for the information. C.f., to pick a completely random example, traffic light sequences and timings, which if there was a clear commercial value (and no way to give out a free non-commercial feed) I wouldn't mind the council making money from.
  • The Bristol Blogger
    It would be interesting to see the data on selling data.

    If there are genuine high-value income streams here then there's an argument for preserving them.

    However, often public sector income is poorly calculated, quoting gross turnover figures and not accounting for any costs.

    Can we get the figures?
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