Open Data Institute Podcasts: Recent Episodes
The Open Data Institute
Listen to podcasts from the Open Data Institute – discussing the impacts of data across areas including health, cities, the built environment, government and finance. Speakers also delve into issues around data ethics, trust, art, culture, corruption and accountability.
ODI Inside Business: How access to real time national data could help businesses recover from the pandemic
In this special edition of the Inside Business podcast, Stuart Coleman, Director of Business Development at the Open Data Institute (ODI) speaks exclusively to Fiona James, the new Chief Data Officer and Director of Data Growth and Operations at the Office for National Statistics (ONS)
On 27 September 2021, the ODI in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge and the Center for Responsible AI at NYU (NYU R/AI) convened an online roundtable to explore experimentation in data policy and practice around how structurally under-represented communities in North America and the EU can be transnational emergent forces that renegotiate or reimagine the social contract under the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
On 27 September 2021, the ODI in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge and the Center for Responsible AI at NYU (NYU R/AI) convened an online roundtable to explore experimentation in data policy and practice around how structurally under-represented communities in North America and the EU can be transnational emergent forces that renegotiate or reimagine the social contract under the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
On 27 September 2021, the ODI in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge and the Center for Responsible AI at NYU (NYU R/AI) convened an online roundtable to explore experimentation in data policy and practice around how structurally under-represented communities in North America and the EU can be transnational emergent forces that renegotiate or reimagine the social contract under the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
On 27 September 2021, the ODI in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge and the Center for Responsible AI at NYU (NYU R/AI) convened an online roundtable to explore experimentation in data policy and practice around how structurally under-represented communities in North America and the EU can be transnational emergent forces that renegotiate or reimagine the social contract under the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
On 27 September 2021, the ODI in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge and the Center for Responsible AI at NYU (NYU R/AI) convened an online roundtable to explore experimentation in data policy and practice around how structurally under-represented communities in North America and the EU can be transnational emergent forces that renegotiate or reimagine the social contract under the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
On 27 September 2021, the ODI in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge and the Center for Responsible AI at NYU (NYU R/AI) convened an online roundtable to explore experimentation in data policy and practice around how structurally under-represented communities in North America and the EU can be transnational emergent forces that renegotiate or reimagine the social contract under the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Provocation 3 – Professor Michael Sanders, the Policy Institute at King’s College London by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 2 – Piret Tõnurist, OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation by The Open Data Institute
Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: A Provocation On Evaluation From Davey Jose, Artist. June 2022
Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: The Keynote From Os Keyes, University Of Washington. June 2022
Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: A Provocation On Valuation From Professor S Craig Watkins, University Of Texas At Austin. June 2022
Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: A Provocation On Valuation From Professor S Craig Watkins, University Of Texas At Austin. June 2022.
Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: Opening Remarks From Our Head Of Public Policy Dr Mahlet (“Milly”) Zimeta. June 2022
Provocation 3 – Jessica Kiessel, Senior Director, Learning & Impact, Omidyar Network by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 2 – Nai Lee Kalema, Member, Tierra Común; doctoral researcher, UCL by The Open Data Institute
Keynote – Professor Chidi Oguamanam, Faculty of Law, University of Ottowa by The Open Data Institute
Introduction – Dr Mahlet ("Milly") Zimeta, Head of Public Policy, ODI by The Open Data Institute
In this podcast, we hear about the importance of community engagement from three participants of the second cohort of the ODI Microsoft peer learning network, an initiative which aims to give data collaborations working on significant societal challenges the opportunity to share and learn from each other.
Host James Maddison, Senior Consultant at the ODI, leads the conversation with Laureen van Breen, Managing Director at WikiRate; Kisha Bwenge, Senior Community Building Manager at the Open Contracting Partnership; and Tim Robertson, Head of Informatics at GBIF.
CSVW is a standard for describing and clarifying the content of CSV tables. In this talk you’ll learn how CSVW can make working with CSV easier and connect you to a web of linked-data.
The humble CSV format is a popular way of publishing open data, and with good reason. It’s easy to create and edit, non-proprietary and machine-readable. It isn’t particularly standardised however and you’ll usually need to do some work to interpret the contents correctly.
The CSVW standard helps to solve these problems letting you focus on using the data. It also lets us interpret data in a global context by connecting tables together into a web of linked-data.
About the speakers Robin Gower Robin dreams of a day when data scientists can focus on analysis instead of spending their time preparing data!
To this end, he works as a Data Designer at Swirrl helping publishers to express their datasets with linked-data. He draws on 15 years experience consulting as an economist and statistician for the UK public and social sectors.
Robin a founding member of Open Data Manchester and wrote and maintains several open source software libraries.
He now lives with his family in Berlin, tinkering with electronics and brewing English ale.
Ross Bowen Ross is all too familiar with wrangling data out of spreadsheets with his favourite programming language, R.
As a statistician who’s worked across several government departments, he is now revolutionising data publishing at the ONS as part of the Integrated Data Programme.
When Ross discovered the world of linked-data, he was immediately excited for its potential in helping people better explore and understand statistics.
At home in Bridgend you’ll often find him practising the piano or pretending to be a superstar DJ.
In order to build and retain reputation, organisations today increasingly need to demonstrate that they can be trusted to use data ethically and responsibly. If an organisation is open about how it gathers, shares and uses data – particularly personal and sensitive data – it will have a positive impact on their brand. However, this also requires a high level of data literacy within the organisation, and an ability to think and work critically with data.
In this latest episode of ODI’s Inside Business podcast, Stuart Coleman, the ODI’s Learning and Business Development Director, speaks to panellists Alessandro Piscopo, Principal Data Scientist at BBC Datalabs, Di Mayze, Global Head of AI and Data at WPP and Jen Rodvold, Head of Digital Ethics and Tech for Good at Sopra Steria.
They explore how their organisations embed data literacy within their teams, how this positively impacts their brands, and what some of the challenges will be in the future.
The podcast covers:
- How data literacy is developed in their organisations
- How they set up good practices, particularly in response to the loss of trust in data that was brought about by scandals such as Facebook/Cambridge Analytica
- How data ethics are embedded into data use, including personalisation
- The tensions between trust and innovation
- Algorithms and transparency
- Next steps in data literacy and predictions for the future
USEFUL LINKS
The ODI website: https://theodi.org/
Podcast webpage on the ODI website: https://theodi.org/article/podcast-the-role-of-data-literacy-in-building-a-trusted-brand/
The ODI’s position on data literacy (blog): https://theodi.org/article/data-literacy-what-is-it-and-how-do-we-address-it-at-odi/
ODI’s data literacy resources: https://theodi.org/article/introducing-the-data-literacy-programme/
ODI training courses: https://theodi.org/events/courses/
Become an ODI member: https://theodi.org/service/membership-networking/
Provocation 3 – Dr Divine Fuh, Director, Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 2 – Dr Urvashi Aneja, Co-Founder, Digital Futures Lab by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 1 – Lucy Harris, Co-Lead, Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) by The Open Data Institute
Keynote – Dr Emiliano Treré, Reader, Cardiff University; Co-Director, Data Justice Lab by The Open Data Institute
Introduction – Dr Mahlet (“Milly”) Zimeta, Head of Public Policy, ODI by The Open Data Institute
How better data ecosystems can help the UK understand national wellbeing.
As part of the ODI's Data Ecosystems & Innovation programme, we have been looking at data to measure the recovery in the UK.
We often see headlines in the news about how GDP is down, or inflation is up, or CO2 emissions are rising. But how are these numbers created? Where does the data come from? What are the ecosystems, or the flows of data, that make these measurements possible? More importantly, how can we improve this data for better decision making?
We first looked at the Office of National Statistics (ONS) and how it uses data from alternative sources to get a more real-time view of the economy. Next, we analysed some of the data to measure net zero. Particularly greenhouse gas emissions data from the ONS and the database on potential CO2 storage sites from the British Geological Survey.
In our final part of this work, we look at data to measure wellbeing in the UK. Measuring wellbeing is a topic with a real breadth of research behind it and drives policymaking in a number of countries. There have been quite a number of indexes to measure wellbeing. These include the Human Development Index, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Better Life Index, and the ONS's National Wellbeing Dashboard.
To help us gain a better understanding of this topic, we spoke to two experts on wellbeing in the UK: Jennifer Wallace, Director at the Carnegie UK Trust, and Nancy Hey, Executive Director at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing.
LINKS Jennifer Wallace, Director at Carnegie UK: - Carnegie UK: https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/ - Carnegie's 'Gross Domestic Wellbeing' report: https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/publications/gross-domestic-wellbeing-gdwe-an-alternative-measure-of-social-progress/ - Jennifer's book 'Wellbeing and Devolution': https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-02230-3 - Jennifer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jen_CarnegieUK
Nancy Hey, Executive Director at What Works Centre for Wellbeing: - What Works Wellbeing: https://whatworkswellbeing.org/ - Nancy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/work_life_you
Wellbeing reports – Office of National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing
ODI’s work on data to measure the economy and net zero: - Real-time data to measure the economy: insights from the ONS: https://theodi.org/article/real-time-data-to-measure-the-economy-insights-from-the-ons/ - Build Back Better: the data behind UK’s net zero transition: https://theodi.org/article/build-back-better-the-data-behind-uks-net-zero-transition/ - Analysis on the data to measure the UK's net zero goals: https://github.com/theodi/data-ecosystems-net-zero/blob/main/UKNetZero.ipynb
Some other indexes of social progress: - Human Development Index: https://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi - Better Life Index: https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/ - Thriving Places Index: https://www.centreforthrivingplaces.org/ - Happy Planet Index: https://happyplanetindex.org/ - Community Needs Index: https://ocsi.uk/2019/10/21/community-needs-index-measuring-social-and-cultural-factors/ - Genuine Progress Indicator: https://sustainable-economy.org/genuine-progress/
Slides are viewable here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v-5z6HwGy8bq3j6EV4ZnsUt35HzEPAoZvGLOgWX3pfs/edit?usp=sharing
In this talk, Claire Fram (Director and Product Manager, Diagonal) and Gala Camacho (Director and Data Scientist, Diagonal) discuss the challenges of making use of fragmented (open) data in the built environment. City planners, architects, developers and engineers are faced with a plethora of data that exist in orthogonal layers, limiting their ability to interrogate how city systems interact.
The solution includes new technologies that can unlock greater value from myriad open data sources by stitching them together in a systematic, semantic model of the world. We can get more out of existing open data with the right tools. This lecture will introduce Diagonal’s approach to building data models for data science in the built environment.
About the speakers Claire Fram
Claire specialises in delivering digital tools for city planning. She is a founding member and Product Manager at Diagonal, building tools and visualisations that unlock creativity, progress and better decisions in the built environment. She’s currently on maternity leave from Arup, where she’s been the product lead for their agent based modelling toolkit – building a suite of data processing tools to model transport networks, infrastructure, and simulate millions of individuals’ unique days. Claire is interested in open data and inclusive technologies for urban design.
Gala Camacho
Gala is a mathematician and programmer, with a background in education, optimisation and all-things data. She has worked at big corporations and startups within the civil infrastructure and urban planning ecosystem, leading analytics projects strategically and technically. Gala is passionate about using analytics to explore and break down urban and social inequalities. She sits on the board of Women in STEMM Australia, and the steering committee of Women+ in Geospatial.
How can open research help overcome the issues currently affecting the research community?
In this talk, Ashley Farley (Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services and the lead of the Open Access team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) discusses the issues currently plaguing the research community – such as perverse incentives, publish or perish perceptions, and information overload – and how open research practices can provide a salve.
The solution focuses on building from community-led initiatives and imbuing the ecosystem with transparency, ending with a call-to-action to make history by changing the status quo. The time for open access is now and this presentation will explain why.
This lecture will be pre-recorded. Submit questions for Ashley Farley to answer during the Q&A section here by Monday 24 January: https://forms.gle/xZMrpJYsgi34KDxe8
About the speaker Ashley Farley is the Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services and the lead of the Open Access team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has spent more than 10 years in both academic and public libraries, focusing on digital inclusion and providing access to scholarly content. She is a passionate advocate for Open Access and believes that free and accessible research increases and expedites innovation, helps solve problems faster, and ultimately saves more lives sooner.
In this talk, Adam Mew (Developer Marketing Lead, Ordnance Survey) and Carly Morris (Head of Geovation, Ordnance Survey) share how the OS Map & Hack enabled geospatial data to be used to drive sustainable innovation across multiple industries and disciplines.
OS Map & Hack was a virtual hackathon dedicated to transportation and sustainability, bringing together teams across government, private enterprise, start-up, and academia communities. The outputs included new and enhanced solutions for Electric Vehicle (EV) infrastructure planning as well as routing and navigation apps, which enhance the consumer experience and the behaviours of owning and adopting EVs.
About the speakers Carly Morris is the Head of Geovation at Ordnance Survey – a community of over 1800 start-ups, investors, corporate innovators and developers who all understand the power of location data. Her role is to lead the Geovation team and strategic direction of the business, offering accelerator programmes, innovation challenges and events in the UK and internationally.
Prior to joining Geovation, Carly was the Head of Innovation at International Airlines Group Cargo, where she led the global innovation strategy and worked with start-ups to test everything from drones to VR in the airline. She has received industry-wide recognition for her work, being featured in outlets such as CNBC and Women in Technology, and was a Tech Women 100 winner in 2020. Carly speaks 5 languages and in her spare time enjoys practicing them by travelling as much as possible!
A keen interest in future trends and innovation, Adam Mew is the developer marketing lead at Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency. His role brings OS data and APIs into new and emerging markets, bringing its data platform closer to a growing audience of developers and data scientists.
Before OS, Adam spent time within the defence and national security sector at UK innovator Roke and Chemring, where he led focussed, strategic marketing initiatives and product launches for sensors, AI and data science solution designed for international military and law enforcement agencies. More notably, in the product development and go-to-market of Information and Electronic Warfare solutions.
In this talk, Mateus Domingos will be discussing the Careful Networks project with three of the participating artists: Larisa Blazic, Ailie Rutherford and Shinji Toya.
Careful Networks is a project initiated by Phoenix in partnership with BOM, Furtherfield, The Photographers’ Gallery, QUAD and Vivid Projects.
The temporary P2P network is home to a series of newly commissioned artworks. Each work was initially hosted by another artist. The network exists through a collaborative act of care and stewardship. Visitors are also invited to participate in this. Each of the works has been created within the constraints of a 2mb file size and without external dependencies.
About the speakers Mateus Domingos is an artist/writer based in Leicester, UK. In parallel with his artistic practice, he is a producer for the digital arts programme at Phoenix, Leicester. Alongside the exhibition programme he works on artist development opportunities and hosts a series of meet-ups exploring digital arts practices. He regularly publishes and facilitates workshops that explore creative coding and various digital technologies. He is interested in text, narrative and the use of new digital spaces. His work has included games, 3d printing, fictional alphabets, maps and filmmaking. He runs a publishing project called Bruise.
Larisa Blazic is a London-based digital artisan, educator and feminist hacker with practice ranging from net.art to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) art and design. She explores a range of emerging technologies and their impact on online publishing, moving image in public space, collective creativity and participation through work exhibited nationally, internationally and online. The philosophy driving her art practice is founded on FLOSS philosophy and culture aiming to enable a deep, systematic and critical understanding of the technical, social and cultural contexts where creative practice and technology intersect in order to apply these in contemporary art and design.
Ailie Rutherford is a visual artist working at the intersection of community activism and creative practice. Her collaborative artworks bring people together in conversations about our social and economic landscape using print, performance, sci-fi visioning, games and technology as playful means to work through difficult questions and radically re-think our shared futures. Resulting works range from proposed new models for living and working together to the building of new infrastructure.
Shinji Toya is a digital artist from Japan, based in London in the UK for more than a decade. His practice uses creative programming, artificial intelligence, the Internet, participation, video, image manipulation and painting. It deals with the poetic aspects emerging in the tension between what the systems of knowledge and computation aim to capture and what they fail to capture. The recent practice of Toya critically explores the relationship between image, data, and generative processes emerging through networked participation and digital culture(s). This practice often deals with the post-digital data economy and data erasure.
Hosted by Gavin Freeguard (ODI Special Adviser and data singer-songwriter), special guests from across the ODI discuss some contested data terms – all set to a festive ditty
The BBC is one of the world’s leading broadcasters, producing a large amount of content including video, audio and text, spanning topics such as news, sport, education, and entertainment. In order to fulfil its public service remit, the BBC must serve all its audiences, providing each audience member with the most relevant and engaging content for them.
Up to now, manual curation has been the main approach used by the organisation to achieve that. However, that comes with some challenges: it is unable to scale and to be tailored to each user. Datalab has followed an approach based on cross-team collaboration and on the concept of public service AI to address these challenges. In his talk, Alessandro reflects upon this approach and the lessons learnt in the years since the creation of Datalab.
About the speaker Alessandro Piscopo is a principal data scientist at the BBC, in a team called Datalab. He works on the development and deployment of public service recommendations algorithms across the organisation, to help BBC audiences find the most relevant and engaging content. During his PhD, obtained in 2019 at the University of Southampton, Alessandro studied the effects of socio-technical dynamics on data quality in collaborative knowledge engineering projects.
His current interests include online collaboration, knowledge graphs, and fairness and ethics in AI.
Provocation 2 – Prof Maria Savona, Professor of Economics of Innovation, SPRU University of Sussex by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 1 – Dr Kate Devlin, Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural AI, King’s College London by The Open Data Institute
Keynote – Prof Jenna Burrell, Director of Research, Data & Society by The Open Data Institute
Introduction – Dr Mahlet (“Milly”) Zimeta, Head of Public Policy, ODI by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 3 – Prof Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder/Chief Research and Development Officer, The GovLab by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 2 – Jarmo Suomisto, Project Manager, Helsinki 3D+ by The Open Data Institute
Provocation 1 – Rudi Borrmann, Lead, Open Government Partnership Local by The Open Data Institute
Keynote – Aaron Maniam, Ministry of Communications & Information, Singapore by The Open Data Institute
Introduction – Dr Mahlet (“Milly”) Zimeta, Head of Public Policy, ODI by The Open Data Institute
This is a recording of the ODI Fridays event on Zoom
In this talk, ODI Artist in Residence Rohini Devasher and artist/ODI Art Associate Julie Freeman discuss using technology and data to strengthen our connection to the natural world and our understanding of climate change challenges.
(This talk was originally presented at the V&A Digital Design Weekend)
About the speakers Rohini Devasher’s current research brings together her interest in early scientific observational instruments and contemporary observational sciences, specifically astronomy and atmospheric sciences, to study the twin aspects of the Earth’s skies: its celestial constants on one hand and the mutable objects of the atmosphere on the other.
Through her practice, Julie Freeman translates complex processes and data from natural sources into kinetic sculptures, physical objects, images, sound compositions, animations, VR & AR, questioning the use of data and digital technology in how we translate nature.
After the Grenfell tragedy the government hoped it would be able to address safety issues in other buildings within a year. Now more than four and a half years on, the cladding crisis has turned into a building safety crisis which now impacts hundreds of thousands of homes across the country.
Martin Boyd and Sebastian O’Kelly from the charity Leasehold Knowledge Partnership will discuss:
‘Years of systemic failings in building standards are now exposed. People are unable to afford to remediate the homes they thought were safe, People are unable to move homes. People are unable to sell their homes and people are trapped in buildings they are told are potentially unsafe.’
The talk looks at the role that use of data may have played in the buildup to this crisis and how the continuing lack of data limited the solutions the government is able to consider. It also asks if some decisions are being made without any supporting data.
About the speakers A talk by Martin Boyd and Sebastian O’Kelly of the charity the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership.
In this talk, Dr John Burton – Data Consultant at the Open Data Institute (ODI) – will discuss some of the background of the data ethics work at the ODI and describe what organisations are considering to make their data ethics practices more mature. He will show the work of the ODI on the data maturity model, and share some of the early feedback from our user research in this space. Finally, he will discuss where the organisation is going in the short term and how that may develop the ODI’s offering in this space in the coming months.
About the speaker Dr John Burton has had a varied career, but the main theme has always been investigating complex data sets to find real value for people. He started off with a PhD in Astronomy, and have worked at Queen’s University Belfast, the Universities of Toronto, Leicester and Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher and data scientist. He has been spending his recent career in the public and charity sectors at HMRC and AQA, with the latter being spent as the Head of Analytics and Data Science. In short, he loves data!
Increasingly, the better able you are to tell your performance story the better able you are to get the resources you need for your project.
Francis Loughheed, Senior Policy Advisor at Canadian Forest Service, will present a methodology that brings data to results-based management to tell compelling performance stories. Based on 15 years experience working in performance measurement across the Government of Canada, this presentation will be of special interest for government and public sector agencies, with applicable lessons for the private sector.
About the speaker Mr. Loughheed works with the seven programs of the CFS to support sector performance measurement reporting and the CFS Data Strategy.
His work in data analytics includes:
conception and development of an Executive Portfolio Dashboard, promoting the use of data visualization to inform policy and science decision-making and corporate reporting and, developing a methodology to estimate the economic value of data in the public sector. He is currently working on data pilots in the areas of cloud-based data lake systems, machine learning and augmented intelligence systems to contribute to data-driven impact and is leading a Departmental project on promoting data culture utilising the ODI data skills framework.
In 2020 -21, Open Data Manchester set out to discover whether a data cooperative model could be developed that would enable organisations and communities collect, pool, process and share data for the benefits of their members.
This talk will discusses some of the findings of that work and the work of the Data Cooperative Working Group that formed from it.
This work was supported by the ODI’s Data Stimulus Fund, and Open Data Manchester worked with Carbon Coop and others.
About the speaker Julian Tait is co-founder and CEO of Open Data Manchester CIC, a not-for-profit organisation formed in 2010 that helps organisations and communities understand and use data. He is a passionate advocate for how data and digital technologies can help build more resilient communities through giving people insight and a stake in the processes of governance and decision making. Current work is focussing on the ongoing development of the Declaration for Responsible and Intelligent Data Practice and new forms of data custodianship through the development of data cooperative models.
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The second roundtable took place on Monday 20 September and focuses on experimentation in data policy and practice around environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data and global supply chains. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with Delta 8.7 and the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA).
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The second roundtable took place on Monday 20 September and focuses on experimentation in data policy and practice around environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data and global supply chains. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with Delta 8.7 and the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA).
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The second roundtable took place on Monday 20 September and focuses on experimentation in data policy and practice around environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data and global supply chains. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with Delta 8.7 and the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA).
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The second roundtable took place on Monday 20 September and focuses on experimentation in data policy and practice around environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data and global supply chains. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with Delta 8.7 and the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA).
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The second roundtable took place on Monday 20 September and focuses on experimentation in data policy and practice around environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data and global supply chains. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with Delta 8.7 and the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA).
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The second roundtable took place on Monday 20 September and focuses on experimentation in data policy and practice around environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data and global supply chains. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with Delta 8.7 and the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA).
The National Data Strategy is part of a conversation about the way data is used in the UK. A new report from defenddigitalme describes why it matters that the words used in that conversation alienate young people.
Jen Persson, Founder of defenddigitalme will discuss why common metaphors don’t work, what it means for the success or failure of delivering a sustainable data policy, and what needs to change.
“Data is the new avocado” might describe the decaying shelf life of records, but not much more. “The new oil” cannot tell a child’s life story. Being framed as “the fuel of artificial intelligence” leaves people feeling used. These metaphors fail to describe the multi-faceted nature of personal data, and do not reflect its incompleteness, accuracy, or the authentic self. The language of commodities doesn’t work on their terms or engender the respect young people want to see for the person the data is about. And while the language on data doesn’t fit with young people’s expectations, it doesn’t fit well with our legal frameworks for data governance either.
“The world in thirty years is going to be unrecognizably datamined and it’s going to be really fun to watch,” said Jose Ferreira, then CEO of the adaptive learning company Knewton, at the White House US Datapalooza in 2012. Nearly ten years on, young people don’t find it fun but they do feel exploited.
defenddigitalme’s new report based on research together with Hattusia and the Warren Youth Project, proposes how to reconcile the focus, governance frameworks, and content of the UK national data strategy, to move the conversation forward in ways that work for the economy and research, and include our future generation.
About the speaker Founder of defenddigitalme, Jen Persson campaigns for safe, fair, and transparent data in education, in England and beyond. Defenddigitalme has been advocating for the rights of the 23 million people in the National Pupil Database since 2015, most recently through regulatory action, building on the work of many others.
In The State of Data 2020 report defenddigitalme published a mapping of the most common data flows for a child in England’s state education system, from the seven compulsory censuses a year and eight sets of statutory testing, through to some of the most popular local edTech tools used for administration, assessment, behavioural tracking, and for teaching and learning. The report calls for a new approach to digital rights in schools to build a rights’ respecting environment by 2030, and makes recommendations on how to achieve it.
Jen was a Subject Matter Expert to the Council of Europe 2019-20 during the drafting of Guidelines for Children’s Data Protection in Educational Settings, adopted in November 2020 and she was a joint-recipient of the 2021 Michal-Serzycki-Award from the Polish Data Protection Authority.
In this podcast we hear three inspiring stories from the first cohort of the ODI Microsoft Peer Learning Network, an initiative which aims to give data collaborations working on significant societal challenges the opportunity to share and learn from each other.
Host Elea Himmelsbach leads the conversation with Marisa Miodosky from the Caring Indicator System in Buenos Aires, Claire Ramden who’s developing reuse.id in the UK, and Dr Gao Feng who’s leading on the Fintech Innovation Data Collaboration in Shanghai.
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The first roundtable took place on Monday 19 July and focuses on new parameters in data policy and practice. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS)and the Behavioural Data Science Group at the Alan Turing Institute.
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The first roundtable took place on Monday 19 July and focuses on new parameters in data policy and practice. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS)and the Behavioural Data Science Group at the Alan Turing Institute.
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The first roundtable took place on Monday 19 July and focuses on new parameters in data policy and practice. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS)and the Behavioural Data Science Group at the Alan Turing Institute.
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The first roundtable took place on Monday 19 July and focuses on new parameters in data policy and practice. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS)and the Behavioural Data Science Group at the Alan Turing Institute.
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The first roundtable took place on Monday 19 July and focuses on new parameters in data policy and practice. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS)and the Behavioural Data Science Group at the Alan Turing Institute.
Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an ambitious new ODI policy project, which explores how data policy makers and data practitioners can work in more innovative and experimental ways to adapt to, and leverage, the fast-moving societal and economic challenges and opportunities around new data availability and associated digital technologies.
The first roundtable took place on Monday 19 July and focuses on new parameters in data policy and practice. It was convened by the Open Data Institute in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS)and the Behavioural Data Science Group at the Alan Turing Institute.
In the first episode of the second season of the Open Data Institute’s Inside Business podcast - the ODI’s Learning and Business Development Director, Stuart Coleman, is joined by two self confessed data evangelists, both of whom use storytelling to create a ‘culture’ of data in organisations. One even says that business leaders who don’t understand the importance of data literacy might as well “pack their bags and leave their desks”.
Stuart Coleman, the ODI’s Learning and Business Development Director (host)
Di Mayze, Global Head of Data and AI at WPP, a creative transformation business (guest)
Paul French, former Director of Business Intelligence, Reporting and Visualisation at the Nationwide Building Society (guest).
USEFUL LINKS
The ODI website: https://theodi.org/
Podcast webpage on the ODI website: https://theodi.org/article/inside-business-podcast-why-everyone-in-a-business-needs-to-be-data-literate/
The ODI’s position on data literacy (blog): https://theodi.org/article/data-literacy-what-is-it-and-how-do-we-address-it-at-odi/
ODI’s data literacy resources: https://theodi.org/article/introducing-the-data-literacy-programme/
How can Fortune 500 companies make better use of the data they already have to build a picture of their audience, before conducting new research or data collection?
Sharon Joseph, CEO of CREWASIS and Harvard Business School alumni, will share how to make better use of internal data sources, external data sources and open data using case studies developed in the top healthcare and CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies in the US.
She’ll also share how free tools such as social media monitoring tools and google analytics can help to build a story. Sharon worked at Fortune 500 companies for 20 years before launching CREWASIS data science www.crewasis.com
About the speaker Sharon will draw from examples of working in the consumer goods industry and healthcare, but people from all industries welcome as she works in all industries including financial, cannabis, retail and household goods.
Affective computing refers to the use of computers to analyse data about human behaviour, such as facial expressions, gestures, and language, for its emotional information.
But can a machine really learn about and infer emotions from digitised behaviour, typically captured as text, images, audio and video? How does it compare with human performance? How well do we understand how emotions are expressed and why? In this talk, we will look at the theories and the algorithms, and the benefits and consequences of their application in real-world situations.
About the speaker Sharon Richardson, PhD, is a senior scientist in geocomputation at the University of Zürich. Her research focuses on investigating and applying data-intensive methods to improve understanding of and assist in human, societal and environmental challenges.
Whilst we are the cusp of the pandemic, has anyone considered what will happen in the future when a new threat hits our shores? The government currently relies on letters and SMS messages through fragmented GP practices to mass communicate with us about our health.
Other countries utilise a national ID card to centralise records. When we get our jabs, very little is computerised and we often wonder how our data is being managed, and how we’ll be communicated to. This talk asks: how do we balance freedoms with effective digital health?
About the speaker Danny Bluestone is the CEO of Cyber-Duck, a leading full service digital agency. He founded Cyber-Duck in 2005, inspired by fusing creative, technical and marketing expertise into a superior user experience. Now the independent agency works internationally with prestigious brands, including the Bank of England, Cancer Research and Arsenal FC.
Leading Cyber-Duck, Danny continues developing the agency’s ISO accredited user-centred design process, drawing on lean and Agile management methodologies. In 2015, he was awarded Wirehive 100’s first Digital Leader of the Year. He enjoys giving keynotes for enterprise, UX and technology communities, including the UKTI, UX London and UXPA. His digital insights have been featured in UX Magazine, Econsultancy, and Smashing Magazine.
This podcast, introduced by Jared Keller of the ODI, explores two questions: why is it important for organisations to empower people to play a more active role in deciding what happens to their data? And second, which system of decision making is best - individual, collective or delegated? Three guests, Julian Tait from Open Data Manchester, Anouk Ruhaak from Mozilla Foundation and Emmett Townsend from Inrupt talk about their own organisations and the challenges and benefits of each approach, before opening out a wider discussion around issues of personal consent, legislation and making such initiatives successful and sustainable.
If you are interested in discussing the different types of data institutions and issues of consent around data institutions please get in touch with the team.
‘Why let a few tech executives and engineers control the algorithms that shape our lives? In an effort to democratize this technology, we have created an automated decision making program that learns from you. After a brief assessment, you can be a part of the system. You can be Fairly Intelligent™️.’
Artist A.M. Darke discusses the process of developing Fairly Intelligent™️, a speculative fiction about the world’s worst algorithm posing as the world’s best algorithm.
Please note, this talk starts at a later time of 4pm
About the speaker A.M. Darke is an artist and game maker designing radical tools for social intervention. Still in the class war. Now in the pandemic. He’s in the combination class war and pandemic. Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and New Media, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, at UC Santa Cruz, Darke also directs The Other Lab, an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist research space for experimental games and new media. Darke’s recent work includes ‘Ye or Nay?, a Kanye West-themed game about Black culture, and he is currently developing the Open Source Afro Hair Library, a 3D model database for Black hair styles and textures.
Darke holds a B.A. in Design (’13) and an M.F.A. in Media Arts (’15), both from UCLA. Her work has been shown internationally and featured in a variety of publications, including Kill Screen, Vice, and NPR.
Effective use of data relies on good ethical foundations. While national data institutions have the power to issue papers, guidance, and create sound tools for evaluating ethical needs and setting standards, only the Government has the power to make legislation and issue binding policy requirements.
This talk explores the Government’s practice in one specific area – making legislation relevant to data and digitalisation – though a forensic review of relevant statutes and regulations made in 2020.
Dr Sue Chadwick will talk us through her year of statute-stalking, surveying both the content of the legislation made and the way it was made and applied. She will evaluate those practices against some established codes of digital ethics, including the ODI Data Ethics Canvas and the Government’s own Data Ethics Framework.
About the speaker Sue is a Strategic Planning Advisor at Pinsent Masons LLP with a keen – some might say obsessive – interest in data and the way it will transform the property industry and challenge many of its established foundations.
As one of the ODI’s first ever research fellows she has spent the last year working with their Vice President Jeni Tennison, exploring digital ethics and their implications for planning decisions with a particular focus on human rights, equalities, discrimination, and established codes of practice. Her research is due to be published through the ODI in September.
howthey.watch/you exposes the tracking technology built into our everyday experience of internet browsing. Artist Nick Briz discusses his online work, which explores this technology and asks important questions about its uses beyond fingerprinting and, ultimately, tracking. By exposing the misuses of this technology Briz encourages viewers to take an active role in protecting their online privacy.
This piece was commissioned by ODI Data as Culture for the Rules of Engagement online exhibition and produced as part of the ODI’s R&D programme exploring sustainable ethical practice around data, funded by Innovate UK.
About the speaker Nick Briz is an internationally recognized new-media artist, educator and organizer. His work investigates the promises and perils of living in an increasingly digital and networked world. He is an active participant in various online communities and conversations including glitch art, net art, remix culture, digital literacy, hacktivism and digital rights. He’s co-founder of netizen.org a nonprofit focused on digital literacy and digital culture, he’s Associate Professor Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and a freelance Creative Technologist.
This talk will shed a light on the open data development in China, focussing on key milestones where open data was studied, adopted and re-defined in China.
Dr. Feng Gao, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Open Data China will talk us through what works and what does not about open data in China, and will illustrate the significant differences in open data development between China and western countries. He will also discuss how the ‘re-defined’ open data fits into China’s digital economy agenda and how ‘openness’ may still survive and be re-introduced into China’s data governance.
Please note that the talk is pre-recorded, but the Q&A at the end will be live.
About the speaker Dr. Feng Gao is the co-founder and managing director of Open Data China, the first civic group and social enterprise in China working on data transparency and digital rights. He led the team implementing Shanghai Open Data Apps (SODA), which is a competition-based open data program and unlocked more than 60 datasets from 30 government agencies and private companies, generated nearly 1000 prototypes and applications, and cultivated several startups with over 100 million CNY investments. Feng is a member of IVLP, and a World Fellow at Yale. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton, and a BE in Computer Science from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
Data is the life blood of the healthcare system. It has the enormous potential to address societal and economic health challenges like early the early detection, screening and monitoring of non-communicable diseases, like Parkinson’s.
To maximise the potential of AI in the treatment of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), there’s an urgent need to transform the healthcare system by opening access to data collected during healthcare interventions.
iKure is a primary healthcare provider with focus on addressing the issues of accessibility, availability, affordability and trust when it comes to connecting patients with healthcare services. Use of technology is an integral part of iKure’s business model and operations, and it has a proprietary medical collaboration platform called Wireless Health Incident Monitoring Systems (WHIMS) that presents unprecedented potential in diffusion of clinical, preventive and diagnostic insights. Utilising data analytics and artificial intelligence, iKure’s technology application is attuned for mapping diseases pattern and aligns clinical decision with actions to improve better health outcomes.
Through this discussion, we want to bring attention and interest to the small-scale local health data source can serve as a high value open data repository with enormous potential to address non-communicable disease, like hypertension. While big data can provide dramatic advances in the treatment of NCDs, local data – despite its inherent challenges and limitations – in data collection stands as a potentially rich resource in treatment efficacy and health-based studies.
We will focus on opportunities in data privacy through open data platforms, and challenges that persist in collecting high quality data to find insights of the locally derived relationship between culture, behaviour and clinical information, which may bring shift in care delivery model to better serve the stakeholders in the entire health ecosystem.
About the speakers Tirumala Santra Mandal, PhD, is a Senior Research and Communication Analyst at iKure. She has authored and edited publications for various peer-reviewed journals.
Anindita Dey is a data analyst and machine learning enthusiast at iKure.
People are increasingly buying online – accelerated by the growth of Covid-19. This year IMRG Capgemini Online Retail Results for January 2021 revealed that UK online sales grew 74% year-on-year in January 2021.
But what does this mean for our local areas, and how can couriers, businesses, councils, local families and activists work together to ensure local deliveries are safe, clean and healthy?
In this talk, Martin Howitt from The Data Place will explain how they are collecting environmental data from eCargo bikes to explore how data collaboration can help solve these challenges.
About the speaker Martin Howitt is co-founder and technology lead for The Data Place, a Plymouth-based social enterprise made up of data scientists, designers, community builders and strategists who combine design tools with data methods to help people and places do better things with data.
In this fourth episode of the ODI Inside Business podcast, the ODI’s Learning and Business Development Director, Stuart Coleman, is joined by high-profile expert, Robin Sutara, newly appointed Chief Data Officer at Microsoft UK, for a lively discussion on why culture change should power organisations’ data strategy plans.
We explore what cultural and mindset shifts are needed to facilitate the implementation and execution of a viable data strategy.
We also discuss how Microsoft has shifted their thinking, and that of their clients, to get where it is today and succeeded in helping their clients transition into a new digital thinking era.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Stuart Coleman, the ODI’s Learning and Business Development Director (host)
Robin Sutara, Chief Data Officer, Microsoft UK
USEFUL LINKS
The ODI website: https://theodi.org/
Podcast webpage on the ODI website: https://theodi.org/article/developing-post-pandemic-data-strategy-why-culture-change-should-power-your-plans-podcast/
The ODI’s position on data strategy (blog): https://theodi.org/article/data-strategy-how-an-ecosystem-approach-can-help-shape-your-vision/
The ODI’s checklist for leaders: https://theodi.org/article/odi-inside-business-a-checklist-for-leaders/
ODI Inside Business webinar (live on 31 March 2021, but also available on demand): https://theodi.org/event/how-to-develop-a-transformative-data-strategy-with-an-ecosystem-approach/
Does more data make for better politics? Are new sources of data, on everything from expenses to voting to Wikipedia changes, altering how we think about politics? What can the monitoring of parliament tell us about what impact, good or bad, this is having on democracy?
We can now monitor the activities of our representatives in ways we couldn’t imagine a few decades ago, seeing at the push of a button how they vote, what they say and what they spend. Our new project looks at whether new platforms and sources, from TheyWorkToYou to IPSA’s expenses map, are changing the behaviour of those being watched and the attitudes of those watching.
Our findings so far show how the new data are being used by a range of people, from activists and journalists to MPs themselves. All these new sources are, at least sometimes, making MPs and Peers more accountable, and subtly impacting upon how they represent us. Data has also helped shaped the expenses expense scandal, proxy voting and reform of the House of Lords.
Together new data makes for a democracy we can shape ourselves and use to question, query, and crowds-source. It can also make those we elect more responsive and more responsible. However, in reporting on voting and expenses, the new data can sometimes reinforce old, unhappy stories we tell each other about politics and politicians.
About the speakers Stefani Langehennig is a researcher in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London and a Senior Data Scientist in Public Policy at ICF International. She received her PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in American politics and political methodology in 2019. Her research focuses on legislatures, public policy, and computational social science.
Ben Worthy is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College. His research focuses on transparency and openness, and he has written on FOI, open data and British Politics.
On 3 March 2021 the Open Data Institute (ODI) convened the ‘Inclusive data roundtable’ in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Centre for Public Data, bringing together representatives from government, academia, funders, civil society and community organisations.
The aim of the roundtable was to catalyse discussion and creative thinking as we prepare the ODI’s response to the ONS Inclusive Data Taskforce consultation, so the meeting was structured around a series of provocations. These provocations are included below with the speakers’ permission, and we encourage you to explore them and consider some of the key questions that they prompted for us.
On 3 March 2021 the Open Data Institute (ODI) convened the ‘Inclusive data roundtable’ in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Centre for Public Data, bringing together representatives from government, academia, funders, civil society and community organisations.
The aim of the roundtable was to catalyse discussion and creative thinking as we prepare the ODI’s response to the ONS Inclusive Data Taskforce consultation, so the meeting was structured around a series of provocations. These provocations are included below with the speakers’ permission, and we encourage you to explore them and consider some of the key questions that they prompted for us.
On 3 March 2021 the Open Data Institute (ODI) convened the ‘Inclusive data roundtable’ in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Centre for Public Data, bringing together representatives from government, academia, funders, civil society and community organisations.
The aim of the roundtable was to catalyse discussion and creative thinking as we prepare the ODI’s response to the ONS Inclusive Data Taskforce consultation, so the meeting was structured around a series of provocations. These provocations are included below with the speakers’ permission, and we encourage you to explore them and consider some of the key questions that they prompted for us.
On 3 March 2021 the Open Data Institute (ODI) convened the ‘Inclusive data roundtable’ in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Centre for Public Data, bringing together representatives from government, academia, funders, civil society and community organisations.
The aim of the roundtable was to catalyse discussion and creative thinking as we prepare the ODI’s response to the ONS Inclusive Data Taskforce consultation, so the meeting was structured around a series of provocations. These provocations are included below with the speakers’ permission, and we encourage you to explore them and consider some of the key questions that they prompted for us.
On 3 March 2021 the Open Data Institute (ODI) convened the ‘Inclusive data roundtable’ in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Centre for Public Data, bringing together representatives from government, academia, funders, civil society and community organisations.
The aim of the roundtable was to catalyse discussion and creative thinking as we prepare the ODI’s response to the ONS Inclusive Data Taskforce consultation, so the meeting was structured around a series of provocations. These provocations are included below with the speakers’ permission, and we encourage you to explore them and consider some of the key questions that they prompted for us.
Data about people’s health is no longer confined to medical records and clinical trials. It is gathered by wearable technologies and smartphone apps; it is inferred from shopping habits and online behaviour; it is used by insurers and advertisers for purposes besides healthcare or medical research. This is the datafication of health, and it has significant consequences for people and society.
My colleagues and I at the Ada Lovelace Institute have been working to better understand the datafication of health: what it is, how it occurs, and its impacts on individual and social wellbeing. We’ve synthesised existing research and surfaced the societal and ethical challenges that occur when the boundaries of what is or isn’t health data become blurred. We’ve put forward evidence that the datafication of health has created an ‘Internet of Health’, in which everyone is made to perform as a patient, subject to continuous monitoring, diagnosis and prediction.
In this talk, I’ll chart the mechanisms through which datafication occurs and explore how datafication challenges existing practical, legal and conceptual definitions of what counts as ‘health data’.
About the speakers Aidan is a Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, an independent research and deliberative body with a mission to ensure data and AI work for people and society. He leads on public engagement projects, convening a diverse range of voices to understand and address the societal impacts of technology across a range of sectors: from health and biometrics to data governance.
Previously, Aidan worked at Wellcome on social and ethical issues of AI and data in health, including working with Understanding Patient Data and the Data for Science and Health priority area. His background is in humanities and social science with a focus on relationships between technology, culture and society.
In this third episode of the ODI Inside Business podcast, the ODI’s Learning and Business Development Director, Stuart Coleman, is joined by four high-profile business leaders for a lively discussion on data strategy, and why it matters for businesses now more than ever.
We explore what data strategy means to different types of organisations and how it should take into consideration the wider data ecosystem, outside business boundaries.
We also discuss some of the challenges and barriers that organisations might face when looking to develop a robust data strategy, including behavioural change.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Stuart Coleman, the ODI’s Learning and Business Development Director (host)
Justin Fitzpatrick, CEO, Duedil
Caroline Gorski, Group Director, R2 Data Labs, Rolls-Royce
Lubomila Jordanova, CEO and Co-Founder, Plan A
Ming Tang, National Director Data and Analytics, NHS England and NHS Improvement
USEFUL LINKS
The ODI website: https://theodi.org/
Podcast webpage on the ODI website: https://theodi.org/article/data-strategy-why-it-matters-for-businesses-now-more-than-ever-podcast/
The ODI’s position on data strategy (blog): https://theodi.org/article/data-strategy-how-an-ecosystem-approach-can-help-shape-your-vision/
The ODI’s checklist for leaders: https://theodi.org/article/odi-inside-business-a-checklist-for-leaders/
When a 999 emergency call is made to the Coastguard in the UK, the relatively seamless, well-oiled nature of the process would lead most people to assume that only one organisation is behind the heroic rescue effort. In reality, a variety of organisations come together to perform a rescue operation and the data generated by this are equally as broad and diverse.
Similarly, the fact that many organisations work harmoniously in this way would lead us to assume that all data generated from marine incidents are harnessed and pooled for maximum mutual benefit. Coupled with the UK Government’s drive towards transparent open data over the past decade, it is also a fair assumption that marine incident data would be publicly available, in a similar way to UK Police crime statistics. In reality, neither of these two assumptions are true. Apart from the RNLI who have only just entered the open data arena in 2020, marine incident data in the UK are mostly closed and not even shared freely among agencies that may benefit from their use.
Marine incident data can only be made publicly available after they are shared internally between first responder agencies. The Open Marine Data project is about presenting a blue-print for how these issues may be solved. Chris Emberson from Southampton University shares the complexities surrounding the collection of data on a marine incident, including its ‘varying’ location, as well as how the emergence of automated approaches to data sharing in the emergency services sector can be used to make data sharing more instantaneous. We conclude by demonstrating how open data can be used to inform the ‘real-time’ picture of where people are located in a coastal setting, demonstrating the value of open marine incident data.
About the speaker Chris Emberson is a specialist in geographical information with over 20 years’ experience in analysing and mapping the fluidity of human behaviour. Chris has worked with GeoData at the University of Southampton since 2017, where he has previously managed the development of a near-real-time marine data risk model, for the promotion of safety in inshore waters. Chris is a proponent of open source data and technologies, particularly those with a spatial bias that have allowed GIS to become a more mainstream discipline.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be one of the principal factors in how we now organize our daily existence. The pandemic has – rightly – become the focus of much of the planet and in the scramble to manage local outbreaks and protect national economies, new ways of collating information ‘to protect the public’ have been rolled out on masse. The pandemic, and our response to it, has brought to the fore many questions in relation to how and who collects, uses maps and understands data.
However, this is nothing new. While the idea of data driving our lives is newly confronting to many, such technologies – and their failings – have long been used to shape the lives, and deaths, of millions around the world. In the digital age, mapping and data continue to be seen as a fix-all. More people than ever are subjected to having their lives dictated not by elected officials, but by black box algorithms, maps, and data visualisations. As our attempts to hold the pandemic at bay continue, we must look at lessons from other crises and push for a more just world.
In this lunchtime lecture, Doug Specht (University of Westminster) and Monika Halkort (Lebanese American University), draw upon their research and recent publication, Mapping Crisis (2020, University of London Press) to examine the use of data in times of crisis and draw out ethical discussion and chart ways we can work better for the good of humanity.
About the speakers Doug Specht is a Chartered Geographer (CGeog. FRGS), a Senior Lecturer (SFHEA) and the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. His research examines how knowledge is constructed and codified through digital and cartographic artefacts, focusing on development issues in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he has carried out extensive fieldwork. He speaks and writes on topics of data ethics, development, education and mapping practices, is the editor of Mapping Crisis (2020, University of London Press), and co-editor for forthcoming volumes on Geospatial technology and society (2021, Routledge), and Apocalyptic politics in the Anthropocene (2021, Routledge Environmental Humanities).
Monika Halkort is an assistant professor of digital media and social communication at the Lebanese American University. Her research centres on the intersectional dynamics of digital materiality, race and dehumanisation in contemporary data regimes. Taking irregular migration in the Mediterranean as an example, her most recent work unpacks how conflicting horizons of death are negotiated and modelled in data, opening up new zones of non-being that have been characteristic of modern coloniality.
Data assets have more value when used collaboratively than on their own. For many organisations, however, this kind of collaboration is currently very difficult, whether because the data they handle is private or otherwise sensitive, or they lack the resources and know-how to embark on large-scale cooperative projects.
The concept of ‘data federations’ offers a model which allows multiple parties to commit their digital assets to a shared project whilst retaining control over the extent to which their data is exposed, as well as reducing the need for standardisation. This is achieved through a flexible, purpose-oriented approach to collaboration building combined with the deployment of privacy-preserving technologies such as distributed data mining or federated learning, which allow insights or predictive models to be generated from data without requiring it to be gathered in a central location.
In this talk, writer and researcher Richard Woodall will describe how, by offering an alternative path towards collaboration, a ‘data federation’ opens the benefits to a new range of people, allowing smaller and less digitally mature organisations the chance to develop shared value from their digital assets, cultivate cooperative relationships, and build their capacity for strategic coordination.
About the speaker Richard Woodall is a writer and researcher with an interest in the culture and political economy of digital technologies. For the past year his work at Etic Lab has focussed on the theory and practice of building Data Federations
The second episode in our R&D podcast has landed!
As part of the ODI’s Research and Development programme, we have been investigating the financial challenges faced by data institutions, and over the past few months we have started to create free tools to help data institutions understand the financial options available to them and how each will impact their existing business model.
In this podcast, host Jo Kingston is joined by ODI team members Sonia Duarte, Ben Snaith and Joe Massey to discuss the tools and resources that are being developed to help data institutions become financially sustainable. Also taking part is Graham Faiz, Principal Consultant and Digital Innovation Lead at DNV GL, which aims to help the UK achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 using data sharing to support decarbonisation, and who has been testing our prototype decision making canvas.
We are still looking for feedback and for people to test our tools, so if you are If you are part of a data institution, or are interested in creating or funding one, please get in touch with a member of the team via https://theodi.org/about-the-odi/contact-us. We would love to hear from you and help you overcome your challenges!
Episode two features: Joe Massey, Ben Snaith and Sonia Duarte (researchers), Graham Faiz from DNV GL and Jo Kingston (podcast host and comms associate)
In this podcast, ODI’s Business Director Stuart Coleman is joined by Dame Wendy Hall DBE, FRS, FREng, Regius Professor of Computer Science, Associate Vice President (International Engagement) and Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, Helen Crooks, Chief Data Officer Ofgem and Ambassador for AI and Data Economy for Innovate UK, Christopher Argent, Founder and Managing Director, Generation CFO, and Abubakar Suleiman, CEO, Sterling Bank.
Fields like accountancy, finance, medicine and law are all highly professionalised, and have formally recognised training, (e.g. Certified Public Accountant – CPA; CFA – Certified Financial Analyst, etc.) that adds a credibility stamp to their expertise. This increases their trustworthiness within their network. We tend to trust people in white-collar professions because they are certified by a credible and highly respected third party. They have well established ethical codes of conduct, like the Hippocratic Oath for medical professionals.
Such a credibility stamp doesn’t exist in data. We have no way to tell if people in data have the same level of credibility. Not having data professionalised could be a threat to all of us, customers, clients, organisations and society as a whole. Low trust or a lack of it can compromise an organisation’s reputation and stifle innovation.
Data needs to be professionalised in order for Chief Data Officers, Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers to demonstrate and build trust with their internal and external audiences. What businesses need to do with data must be codified – there is a lack of clarity around what people should be doing – around skills, ethics and infrastructure. That gap might be indicative of the low professionalisation of the field.
In this episode the panellists will explore whether a lack of formal AI and data literacy in the boardroom is a significant risk to an organisation’s reputation.
This podcast was recorded remotely over Cleanfeed. This is one of an occasional series of webinars and podcasts.
In this podcast, ODI’s Business Director Stuart Coleman is joined by Richard Young (Industry and Regulatory Affairs – Global Data at Bloomberg LP), Alex Steer (Chief Data Officer, Wunderman Thompson) and Faisal Khan (Chairman, Zabardast and Chair, Institute of Directors, South)
COVID-19 has shown that in all levels of society, we need a reliable data infrastructure. It’s the pipework that will keep supply chains functioning and businesses trading in normal times as well as during a crisis.
Sound data infrastructure helps businesses make the critical decisions to guide them back to growth and help build resilience. Yet many leaders don’t fully understand their obligations where the data that their company holds and handles are concerned. These go beyond GDPR compliance to areas of corporate governance and fiduciary duty.
Senior executives are ultimately responsible for their company’s data; how it is collected, handled and shared. In the past few years, the impact of data mishandling on companies’ reputations have been seen clearly in various high-profile data disasters including the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So this is a responsibility that all leaders should take seriously.
At the ODI, we are exploring how they should consider their company’s data handling and data infrastructure as part of an overall approach to governance. In the first episode of our ODI Inside Business series, host Stuart Coleman, is joined by:At the ODI, we are exploring how they should consider their company's data handling and data infrastructure as part of an overall approach to governance. In the first episode of our ODI Inside Business series, host Stuart Coleman, is joined by : Richard Young, Industry and Regulatory Affairs - Global Data at Bloomberg LP Olivia Hawkins, Consulting Director, Wunderman Thompson Data Faisal Khan, Chairman, Zabardast and Chair, Institute of Directors, South In this essential listen for all business leaders, the panel considers whether senior executives are sufficiently aware of their data stewardship responsibilities and the consequences of overlooking them. And they debate whether business leaders have the necessary skills and knowledge to ensure their organisations are managing their data ethically and effectively.
This podcast was recorded remotely over Cleanfeed. This is one of an occasional series of webinars and podcasts
The 1st episode in our new R&D podcast!
Host Isabel Roberts is joined by ODI team members Diana Szasz, Ben Snaith and Sonia Duarte, who will be discussing research underway by the team on the financial sustainability of #datainstitutions
This podcast was recorded remotely over Zoom
Sebastian Wilson, Director of Hankin Consulting, will talk about how technology is used in the finance sector and how customer data is used for insights, decision-making and improving online journeys
About the speaker Sebastian Wilson is Director of Hankin Consulting which offers strategic direction for technology transformation programmes. Sebastian’s extensive experience has led him to lead successful Cloud projects for ICAP, UBS, SKY TV, core banking strategy projects at Ernst & Young and Icap. He also has extensive audit capabilities with PWC with Colt Communications and launching apps for Carphone Dixon, redefining the retail high street experience and Sky TV.
Sebastian is also championing inclusion and diversity within the technology and banking sectors, across all levels.
Never before has data played such an integral and granular role in how we live. On a daily basis, we are asked to make decisions about personal data about us – consenting to it being collected and used for many purposes. But how do we feel and think about data? Do we understand what the different types of data about us are, do we care how it is used, can we even control how it is used? The ODI, alongside the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) and Luminate have explored what people think and feel about data, data rights and data ownership. Join us for this ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture to hear more about that work, what people want to see happen next and learn the about the different types of data about us. About the speaker Renate Samson is Senior Policy Advisor at the ODI. Renate works across a wide range of subjects at the ODI from data rights to open cities, protected characteristics, trust, ethics and data institutions.
The government collects and publishes a lot of data as official statistics, but currently citizens, businesses and government itself are not taking full advantage of that.
Darren and Bill from Swirrl will report on the Connected Open Government Statistics (COGS) project, seeking to make ambitious changes in the way that statistics are disseminated and used. The established approach to stats releases, of PDF commentary and accompanying spreadsheet tables is part of the picture, but not enough in this age of data, the web and automation. That means big changes to technology choices and more importantly to culture, data governance and mindset.
About the speakers Bill Roberts is CEO of Swirrl, a company specialising in software for government organisations to publish their data in standards-based machine-readable ways. As well as providing the software platform for statistics.gov.scot, Swirrl works with the Office for National Statistics, Defra, MHCLG, the Scottish Government and others on ensuring open government data can have the maximum positive impact. Swirrl is a member of the W3C.
Darren Barnes has worked in ONS for nearly 30 years and much of this time has been spent in transformational roles. Over the last 12 months his focus has been on what the Government Statistical Service landscape looks like and how we can improve the situation for both statistical producers and users alike.
Theo Blackwell MBE is London’s first ever Chief Digital Officer. A big role, indeed – but what’s it actually like to be dropped into a role which carries with it so many city-wide expectations? What challenges did he face, and why did London need him in the first place? Theo will talk about opportunities, challenges and where he came from. He’ll also have some handy advice for new CDO’s taking on big new responsibilities. About the speaker Appointed in 2017, Theo leads on London-wide digital transformation, data and smart city initiatives at City Hall.
In this podcast, the ODI's Data Institutions Lead, Jack Hardinges talks about our work with the INSIGHT Health Data Research Hub for eye health. When the podcast was recorded, the Hub was known as the Data Innovation Hub
Dr Wen Hwa Lee is the CEO of the charity, Action Against Age-related Macular Degeneration (AAAMD). The organisation is focused on tackling the leading cause of legal blindness in the developed world at its earliest stages. AAAMD is one of the partners delivering the INSIGHT Health Data Research Hub and the ODI is working with them to decide how the data made available by INSIGHT is shared. In this episode of the podcast, Dr Lee describes the potential that could be unlocked by INSIGHT and what motivated him, personally, to get involved. When the podcast was recorded, the Hub was known as the ‘Data Innovation Hub’
Described by The Times as ‘the world’s only Thrill Engineer’, performance artist Brendan Walker will give a broad overview of his creative digital projects from the last 20 years. Brendan’s projects often use live broadcast and recorded data from a mixture of sources that include: biomedical sensors, environmental monitoring and black box instrumentation. His projects span live performance and installation, and are just as likely to feature on the TV as factual entertainment, as they are to appear in art galleries and museums. About the speaker Brendan Walker is a Renaissance Showman – a technology-inspired performance artist. His multi-faceted thrill performances have provided popular entertainment for audiences from the Science Museum to Alton Towers, and his work has featured at V&A, London and MoMA, New York. Brendan originally trained and worked as an aeronautical engineer, before practicing as a digital artist and ride designer. Brendan is Professor of Creative Industries at Middlesex University and a regular broadcaster on TV and radio.
As a poet, I’ve always lived on intuition, imagination and inspiration. My world has often been something far removed from even the most remotest of clouds. So imagine my surprise when I was invited to compose data-related poems for the ODI. To try to find the abstract among the AI, the artistry amidst the analytics. Was it possible to find poetry within data? My talk will cover how my brief interactions with Data as Culture at the ODI allowed me to combine it with my love of classic poetry and find my own unique interpretation of the world. The result was Bring Me My Fire-Truck, which features in our 2020 exhibition Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication About the speaker Mr Gee has been performing poetry for 20 years. Perhaps best known as the “Poet Laureate” on Russell Brand’s notorious radio show, his work has featured in the Times, The Guardian and the New Statesman. He’s presented many series on Radio 4 and co-hosts a podcast called “The Magic Number”.
Data affects everyone. How it is collected, used and shared can have huge impacts – both direct and indirect – on people’s lives. Data and its (mis)use shape how companies profit, how we consume, even how governments see and serve their populations. But while some organisations are speaking more about responsible data and ethics, many members of the public still aren’t engaged. They see it as boring, dry or too technical to understand – let alone something they can have any real agency over. This is not their fault, but is often because they have not had enough opportunities to meaningfully engage. This needs to change. In this lecture, Anna Scott will talk through creative approaches to engaging people in data issues – from illustrated reports to artworks, games to shadow puppets. She’ll talk about the importance of embedding nuance and asking open-ended questions, inviting audiences to actively form their perspectives and seek more agency. Anna will also make recommendations for people looking to apply these approaches, from putting message before format to enabling good design. About the speaker Anna Scott is a content strategist, trainer and storyteller, specialising in data ethics and rights issues. She works with clients on finding creative, compelling ways to meaningfully engage people in data and tech, giving them more agency and choice for a better, fairer future. Anna used to be Head of Content at the Open Data Institute.
As more of our essential public and private sector services become digital it is vital that providers know exactly who is and isn’t using the services on offer. The only way to do that is to ask, but how can that be done in a meaningful, secure and anonymous way? A new report written by the ODI and funded by the Legal Education Foundation seeks to explain the problem digital services face, explore why and offer recommendations as to how the issue can be tackled by service designers, regulators and further research. Come and hear Dr Natalie Byrom Director of Research at LEF and Renate Samson Senior Policy Advisor at the ODI talk about this fascinating and critical subject. About the speakers Dr Natalie Byrom is Director of Research at The Legal Education Foundation where she leads work helping individuals to secure their rights. She has recently been seconded to Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service as Expert Advisor on Open Data and Academic Engagement, Her remit includes evaluating the impact of technology focused court reform on access to and fairness of the justice system. Renate Samson is Senior Policy Advisor at the ODI. Renate works across a wide range of subjects at the ODI from data rights to open cities and data institutions. She is the project lead on the Monitoring Equality in Digital Public Services report.
Open source design has a plethora of hurdles to leap before it could become fully adopted by the global design community. These challenges include exploitative ‘work for free attitudes’, how software doesn’t yet allow for robust and collaborative versioning across different designers and how the open source community as a whole is over represented by those with privilege, access and ability.
Ushahidi builds humanitarian tools, remotely for some of the most marginalised people across the globe. Its lead designer Eriol Fox will talk us through how they’ve been piloting a series of design jams to solve the problems of how open source design can work by engaging through meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world.
Come if you want to understand the impact design can have in the humanitarian and open source software sector and how to engage designers in humanitarian and tech for good causes. It’s ideal for anyone interested in the future of how OSS and humanitarian tech tools looks
With the cladding crisis causing many homes to now have no value and onerous leasehold terms meaning other homes which do have a value still can’t be sold, Bob Cratchit has had a bit of a rough year. Martin Boyd from the pioneering charity Leasehold Knowledge Partnership describes the long history of flawed housing data and why that always benefits Scrooge and hurts Bob Cratchit About the speaker
Martin Boyd Chair of trustees for the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership who first published work on the size of the leasehold housing sector in 2014 showing it represented perhaps as few as 10% of homes, rather than the governments estimate which claimed leasehold homes represented perhaps a few as 10% of homes.
As part of our R&D project on digital twins, we chatted with Mark Enzer, Chair of the Centre for Digital Built Britain’s Digital Framework Task Group, about the purpose of digital twins, the national digital twin, and the spectrum of possible futures.
Lots of organisations are on a data transformation journey. They’ve written their data strategy and they recognise that interoperability is key – now they want different teams to talk to each other easily to achieve new and innovative things. Most organisations first try to start their data architecture from the middle – but this comes with its own problems. Simon Worthington, Founder of Register Dynamics will explain in this talk how most organisation’s data architecture already exists. People and teams in their organisations already have data models and are interoperating with others as part of their usual business. But how do organisations transform from ad-hoc, local-only thinking to a broad data architecture that is interoperable? Simon will explain how to find the architecture, untangle it and make it useful for everyone – including why doing it saves you time and money and lets new innovation happen. He’ll also introduce his tool Registers.app that helps make data interoperable, always up-to-date and easy to consume. About the speaker Simon is a technologist with years of experience applying cutting-edge data technology to meet real user needs. He has previously worked with the Government Digital Service as part of their data Infrastructure group and with other central government departments to help embed best practice with data. He is now a founder of Register Dynamics, a data consultancy on a mission to make data more useful for everyone, and the creators of Registers.app.
Machine learning is revolutionising healthcare provision and delivery, from mobilising previously inaccessible data sources to generating increasingly powerful algorithmic constructs for prognostic modelling. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that if we do not learn from the mistakes of our past, that we are doomed to repeat them; if it isn’t already too late… In this (irreverent and misleadingly titled) talk, Dr. Bilal Mateen will discuss the importance of definitions, revisit a series of hard truths, and share the story of the world’s most complex and protracted game of 20 questions, all in an effort to highlight the importance of being able to tell the difference between good (data) science and a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign. About the speaker Bilal is a clinical data science fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, a clinical-academic trainee at Kings College Hospital, and an honorary researcher at Warwick University & The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
Data and AI is changing the way we manage workplace risk. Discovering Safety are using data and analytical tools to generate new insight and solutions. Thousands of lives are still lost each year through workplace accidents and ill health. The Health and Safety Executive is leading the way in improving global health and safety performance through its new Discovering Safety Programme. Discovering Safety uses data and analytical tools to generate new insight and develop solutions to address key health and safety challenges for maximum global benefit. It applies expertise in data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to health and safety contexts and is creating impact by working with stakeholders worldwide to derive insight that can be applied in local contexts to substantially improve health and safety and ultimately save lives. If you have an interest in data and AI and how these are changing the way we manage workplace risk come along and find out more about the Discovering Safety programme and how you can get involved.
About the speaker Steven Naylor is a Senior Data Scientist based in HSE’s Science Division and is Associate Director on the Lloyds Register Foundation Discovering Safety Programme. His main area of expertise is in the application of data analytic techniques, including data mining for knowledge discovery, text mining, predictive analytics and statistical machine learning to generate intelligence from multi format data sources to support knowledge creation and inform decision-making.
Mike Rose has been working with the ODI and CABI to help the Ethiopian Government develop and implement a Soil and Agronomy data sharing policy. This talk is looking at how they approached this, how they ensured that they got as much buy in as possible and how they developed a policy – that landed well – based on the principles of FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
Mike will also discuss his hypothesis that open data as an outcome is dead and we need to refocus how we approach open data going forwards. About the speakers
Mike works with individuals, companies, and governments to help them to change in a digital environment. He has worked for the Environment Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs delivering organisational change around data use and data sharing. As a data strategy consultant, he has provided advice and coaching to a range of clients including the Coop, the Ethiopian Government, and Sport England.
ODI Fridays are free lunchtime lectures for everyone. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk. Could ophthalmology be first branch of medicine to be fundamentally reinvented through the application of artificial intelligence? Ophthalmology is among the most technology-driven of the all the medical specialties, with treatments utilising high-spec medical lasers and advanced microsurgical techniques, and diagnostics involving ultra-high resolution imaging. Ophthalmology is also at the forefront of many trailblazing research areas in healthcare, such as stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and – most recently – artificial intelligence. In July 2016, Moorfields announced a formal collaboration with the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, DeepMind. This collaboration involves the sharing of >1,000,000 anonymised retinal scans with DeepMind to allow for the automated diagnosis of diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy (DR). In his presentation, Pearse Keane will describe the motivation – and urgent need – to apply deep learning to ophthalmology, the processes required to establish a research collaboration between the NHS and a company like DeepMind, the initial results of the research.
As politicians enter an intense period of campaigning, questions are being asked about how data about us might be used to micro-target messages. So now feels like the right time to revisit the About Data About Us report by ODI (for the RSA and Luminate) published in September.
The interviews we carried out for the report indicated that people can have different attitudes about being micro-targeted with information that might affect their opinions, than they do about products they may want to buy. So how can we ensure data about us is used fairly, and that people have agency over how data about them is collected, used and shared?
In this podcast, two of the report authors, Renate Samson and Anna Scott reflect on the work, and look ahead to a discussion about some of the issues it covers in next week’s ODI Summit.
The NSPCC is on a data ethics journey to ensure all interactions support their work to safeguard children, and this includes how they work with advertising networks.
They started by looking at cookie tracking across our websites and understanding what is collected and where it goes. From data to people, this will be a practical presentation on the steps they’ve taken, what they’ve reviewed, the questions they’ve asked and their path forward. About the speaker
As Head of Data for NSPCC, Dawn Hemingway leads a multifunctional team driving a significant process, technology and cultural change programme that places the supporter at the heart of every engagement. With more than 20 years of strategic, operational and technical experience gained working across a varied portfolio of clients in commercial agencies, Dawn relishes her role as Data Champion in a progressive cause-driven organisation, devising and delivering compelling data and marketing solutions to maximise performance and efficiency whilst empowering staff and volunteers and delighting customers and supporters.
Marius and Steve from Bristol City Council will be talking about city’s innovative approach to open data, with a focus on air quality data. Marius will describe the council’s engagement projects and collaboration with city partners and the role of open data in delivering on the commitments in the Mayor’s One City Plan as well as Bristol’s new Smart City Strategy.
Steve will explain the context of air quality management in the city as well as the technical aspects of integrating a range of real time air quality data sources onto Opendatasoft’s platform and developing engaging information products based on the air quality data. About the speakers
Steve Crawshaw is the council’s air quality officer. He has worked for Bristol City Council for 21 years and is currently supporting the development of the council’s Clean Air Plan.
Marius Jennings is the council’s open data lead. His work has focused on the delivery of various smart city initiatives across the sub-region.
With ‘Big tech’ is seen as the catalyst, or even the source, of a wave of distrust in truth and institutions, this talk explores the role of technology in creating and maintaining trust.
Deep fakes. Addictive technology. Data breaches. New technology and its (mis)use in the past decade seems to have resulted in a crisis of trust in institutions, and in truth itself. The fix will be slow, complex, and among many other things, we will need to put technology to good use to make things better.
In this talk, ODI Head of Technology Olivier Thereaux will share highlights and learnings from recent projects on technology to support trust, including ARCHANGEL, a collaboration with the University of Surrey and The National Archives on guaranteeing integrity of digital records, as well as the ODI’s recent work on technology for data trusts. About the speaker
As Head of Technology, Olivier leads the ODI’s work researching emerging tech, prototyping tools and services, and exploring the interplay of technology and policy. A graduate of École Centrale Paris, Olivier has worked as a technologist in France, Japan, Canada and the UK for nearly 20 years, focusing on the various facets of open technology: open standards, open source, open data and open innovation.
The idea that human perceptual systems, bodily and social knowledge can be explicated and used in interface design processes, training datasets and enhancing the experience of ‘end users’ runs across many areas including robotics, AI, surveillance and immersive VR.
Artists, scientists and industrialists are all busy responding to the latest technology advances. The field of contemporary dance can be drawn into this discussion, particularly through a number of seminal projects initiated by leading choreographers, including Motion Bank. Based in Mainz, Germany, Motion Bank has worked with several dance artists, such as William Forsythe, to document, digitise and openly share ‘dance knowledge’.
In this talk, examples from these projects will be shown to stimulate questions related to the ownership of such knowledge, humanising technology, safeguarding intangible heritage and a reflection on the potential loss of certain practices. About the speaker
Scott deLahunta has worked on a range of projects bringing performing arts with a focus on choreography into conjunction with other disciplines and practices. He is Professor of Dance at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University and co-director Motion Bank, Mainz University of Applied Sciences.
The UK’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was enacted at the start of the century, and is a central plank of the UK’s openness agenda. Arguably if FOI hadn’t happened, there would be no open data.
One aspect of FOIA that is often ignored though is how it works behind the scenes: who is involved in answering FOI requests? What resources do they have? How do they organise the logistics of dealing with what can be thousands of requests a year? What are the challenges of doing so successfully?
Paul Gibbons is a former FOI Officer and has written a handbook for those who do the job of coordinating FOI compliance, for which he carried out research into the way that the job is done and what constitutes good practice in a relatively new profession.
Anyone who has to answer FOI requests, who makes them, or is interested in the logistics of openness will want to attend this ODI Friday.
Everyone around me talks about data but I have no idea what data can do for me. Do I need to start from scratch to enter the ‘tech’ world or do I already have some basic skills that can help me take the first step? This lunchtime lecture is designed to provide you with an overview of the skills that are involved when working with data to help you identify where your strengths are and what you can do to improve them. As a bonus, you will gain a perspective of the potential skills sets you can train for to become more competent when working with data. Here is a sneak-peak if you are impatient to hear more. About the speaker This lunchtime lecture will be led by the ODI Data Trainer, Violeta Mezeklieva who defines herself as a mix of data driven business consultant & educator – and interest she has been curating for over a decade.
In this talk, Dr Becky Inkster will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities when working in the field of digital mental health. Becky will highlight the importance of ethics and the need for bringing imagination, integrity and inclusivity into digital mental health solutions. Becky is a clinical neuroscientist, seeking innovative ways to improve our understanding and treatment of mental health. She’s passionate about combining sectors on topics related to artificial intelligence, psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, digital ethics, and culture. About the speaker Self-employed neuroscientist; co-founder of Hip Hop Psych; Advisor, Alan Turing Institute, Advisory Board, Lancet Digital Health; Advisor for Wysa, Talklife, Lyrical Kombat; Fellow, Department Psychiatry, Cambridge University; Facebook Global Advisor, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health.
Colouring London is an open data platform, designed by The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis in University College London, to collect, collate, visualise, and make accessible, fifty categories of statistical data, for every building in London How many buildings are there in London? What are their characteristics? Where are they located and how do they contribute to the city? How adaptable are they? How long will they last, and what are the environmental and socio-economic implications of demolition? Colouring London is being designed to address these questions by crowdsourcing and visualising information on London’s buildings. About the speaker
Polly Hudson’s PhD research looks at ways in which spatial patterns of demolition, when observed over long time periods, can help predict vulnerability and resilience in the building stock. Colouring London’ has evolved out of lack of data available to carry out this work, and has been co-designed with Tom Russell, the project’s tech lead. This builds on her work in the 1990s into free physical knowledge exchange centres relating to the building stock, and into public GIS interface design and city evolution animations. She has been a been a visiting fellow at The Centre for the Historic Environment, University of Oxford and has held public appointments at English Heritage, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, The National Lottery (charitable arm) and the RIBA.
London’s rapid growth is putting pressure on cultural infrastructure. London has lost 61% LGBT+ venues, 35% of grassroots music venues and it is estimated that 24%of artists’ workspace sites are at risk of closure. In this talk, hear the many challenges that are faced require a range of interventions to tackle them and how the Greater London Authority is using data to understand, protect and grow cultural infrastructure. About the speaker Rachael Roe is a Senior Policy Officer in the Culture and Creative Industries unit at the Greater London Authority. With a passion for placemaking, planning and practical tools, she delivers a range of research and programmes which aim to secure and expand London’s cultural places and spaces. Rachael has spent 15 years developing and delivering cultural policy across the City as well as in Gloucestershire.
The State of Open Data – Histories and Horizons is a new book that provides a review of the first 10 years of open data. Join Mor Rubinstein, Tim Davies and Carla Bonina to discover insights gained and the challenges still to be overcome as open data enters its second decade
The book brings together over 65 authors from around the world to examine open data from historial, sectoral, and regional perspectives, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come.
About the speaker Mor Rubinstein leads on designing and managing projects that use 360Giving data, commissioning online platforms and tools, as well as collecting and sharing learning about data use. Previously she was Capacity team lead at Open Knowledge International and Project Manager of the Global Open Data Index, a benchmarking tool for open government data publication. Mor has worked on open data around the world with the Public Knowledge Workshop (Israel) and the Oxford Internet Institute and has written several papers on open data use.
Tim Davies is an activist, researcher, and social entrepreneur, who has been working on themes related to open data since 2009. He was Research Lead for the first two years of the IDRC/World Wide Web Foundation’s “Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries” research network and coordinated the first two editions of the global Open Data Barometer. He co-founded Open Data Services Co-op in 2015 to support ongoing development of open data infrastructures, including the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) and data standards for corporate transparency. He was series editor for the Open Data Charter Open-Up Guides on anti-corruption and agriculture. A social researcher by training, Tim has been a fellow of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society and has studied at the Oxford Internet Institute and University of Southampton Web Science Centre. He blogs at http://www.timdavies.org.uk and tweets at https://www.twitter.com/timdavies. Carla Bonina is a social scientist and an expert on digital government and social innovation in Latin America. Carla provides strategic advice to governments, international organisations and philanthropic investors, such as Avina Americas, the OECD, ILDA, and the World Bank among others. She holds a PhD in Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Surrey’s Centre for Digital Economy.
Statistics from the International Labour Organisation illustrate an urgent picture: Every day, 6,300 people die as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases: more than 2.3 million deaths per year. This talk explores if Safetytech could be the answer. Data and digital technology are transforming the way whole industries operate. However, a huge challenge persists in transferring these revolutionary technologies to improve safety and reduce risks, particularly in the critical infrastructure industries which underpin our modern society like energy, food, shipping and transportation. The Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator was set up to help to accelerate the adoption and deployment of digital technology in industry for safety and risk purposes. In this talk, Safety Accelerator Manager, Serena Connor, will share highlights and learnings from the programme’s funded pilot projects aimed at preventing critical operational failures, reducing human errors and saving lives across energy, transport and food industries. About the speaker
After graduating from Stanford University, Serena worked for Washington, DC-based PR firm, Tigercomm, specialising in renewable energy, clean tech and environmental advocacy communications, before joining the Future Cities Catapult in London. Serena now works with innovation consultancy, Tenshi, where she helps corporate and public organisations collaborate to solve challenges. She is currently working for the Lloyd’s Register Foundation as Programme Manager for the Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator – the world’s first global safety accelerator, “making the world a better place through digital innovation.”
This talk reflects on a two year collaboration between the ODI, the University of Surrey and the National Archives in creating technology to improve trust in digital archives.
National archives are not immune to a climate of distrust in institutions – and yet, being trusted to preserve the history of a country without tampering with it, is their raison d’être. Increasingly shifting to the preservation of easily manipulated digital records, sometimes kept in the dark for decades before release, their role is rapidly changing and their viability increasingly challenged.
In this talk, ODI Head of Technology Olivier Thereaux will share highlights and learnings from the ARCHANGEL project, a collaboration with the University of Surrey and The National Archives, and will show that, sometimes, “use some machine learning and put it on a blockchain” actually may be the right answer.
(ARCHANGEL is funded by EPSRC Grant Ref EP/P03151X/1)
About the speaker As Head of Technology, Olivier leads the ODI’s work researching emerging tech, prototyping tools and services, and exploring the interplay of technology and policy. A graduate of École Centrale Paris, Olivier has worked as a technologist in France, Japan, Canada and the UK for nearly 20 years, focusing on the various facets of open technology: open standards, open source, open data and open innovation.
To achieve their vision to be trusted with data by their customers, learn how the Co-op have practically applied data ethics to their planning around new products and services. Get practical guidance from the data team at the Co-op on how they’ve applied data ethics throughout the delivery life-cycle. The Co-op have used the ODI’s Data Ethis Canvas to frame the how to make sensible decisions whilst balancing value and risk appetite. This work has helped them build capabilities to meet regulatory requirements, facilitate a long-term information management culture and supports the Co-op vision to be trusted with data. About the speaker Danny McCarthy is a Data Governance Manager, and has over 15 years working with Data – analysis, BI & reporting, cleanse, migration, projects, warehousing, quality and governance at in the public and private sectors for organisations like GE, Royal London, Manchester City Council and has recently been applying Data Ethics into the design of new Digital products and services at the Co-op.
Linked data is full of promises, but its benefits have mostly been reserved for experts. If more people and organisations are able to link their data, they will be more visible, discoverable and easier to combine with other data among the web – take combining weather data with transport data if the weather affects our journey time, for example. ODI Members and software company OpenDataSoft will describe why it is important that more people can link their data together, and the impact this can have on the usage of their data. They will also introduce their new tool that helps data producers without little to no background knowledge to link data more easily, improving its discoverability and use. The talk may be of interest to anybody working with data and willing to improve its quality, visibility or discoverability. About the speaker Benjamin Moreau is a PhD student at the LS2N Digital Sciences Lab in Nantes while also working in industry at OpenDataSoft. His field of research is the semantic web and, more particularly, controlling usage in the web of data.
Companies across the world think they’re effectively anonymising data about people, but what if someone could reidentify who these people are? Discover the risks and learn about the ODI’s plans to help organisations mitigate those risks. Anonymisation is a set of tools, algorithms and best practices to remove personal information from a dataset while maintaining as much of the data’s utility as possible. In this lecture, Fionntán O’Donnell, the ODI’s Senior Data Technologist, will talk about how to take your data through the anonymisation process in this important, wide-ranging, yet nuanced, subject. In the ODI we believe data should be as open as possible. However, we also believe people who handle that data should do so in a responsible manner. Stewards of data must balance the good of opening and sharing data while handling the risk in sensitive data about people being exposed. About the speaker Fionntán O’Donnell is a Senior Data Technologist and researches how best to use artificial intelligence (AI) and data in fair, accountable and transparent ways. He’s been knocking about researching AI for over a decade now. Initially at the National University of Ireland Galway looking at the semantic web. Then he headed off to Ghent University to study deep learning back before it was even called deep learning. Then to Dublin in the ADAPT Centre, developing machine-learning prototypes in the innovation team. After that he got the boat to London where he worked for the BBC, designing machine-learning systems for News Labs and investigating what AI should mean for a public service broadcaster. He’s called a data technologist because his work is in the intersection between software engineering, research, design, and communication. It can be an odd intersection at times but he’s happy to be there.
With the Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee recently calling for a new independent digital regulator and the government’s Internet Safety Strategy White Paper imminent, it’s a crucial time for digital regulation in the UK. Jacob Ohrvik-Stott discusses where the digital regulation debate is heading and outlines Doteveryone’s proposals for an Office for Responsible Technology. About Jacob Ohrvik-Stott Jacob Ohrvik-Stottis a Researcher at the think-tank Doteveryone, where his work explores digital regulation and the public’s relationship with digital technologies. Prior to joining Doteveryone he worked in energy and climate policy for a global professional engineering body and public engagement, where he ran youth panels, deliberative research and science festivals.
Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia and campaigner for an open knowledge society) once claimed that “The internet interprets any type of centralised planning as a malfunction and routes around it. The command-and-control model is doomed to failure here by the very nature of the network. This is inevitable”. Many of the pioneers of open data, such as Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman, have shared this vision. Yet the world of finance is still predicated on the command-and-control model. A small number of giant banks control the market in commercial and retail lending, the insurance world is dominated by a handful of large players, who alone have access to the corridors of central banks and regulators. Dean Buckner, a retired specialist at the Bank of England, explains how the secretive nature of regulation threatens, rather than supports, the stability of the financial system. About the speaker Dean Buckner worked at the FSA and then the Prudential Regulation Authority and Bank of England for nearly 20 years, specialising in asset valuation and capital modeling in both the banking and life insurance sector. After he retired from the Bank in January 2018 he set up Eumaeus.org with Kevin Dowd of Durham University, a project to ‘keep an eye on’ regulatory institutions such as the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority and to campaign for regulatory reform, particularly around the need for the financial regulatory system to be more open.
Imposter syndrome is a big issue in the data sector, particularly in leaders. Everyone thinks they should know more about it. When leaders don’t confront impostor syndrome or seek help to develop their data skills it can cause blockers. They start working on assumptions, bring in expensive consultants etc. Simon Bullmore will discuss his own experience of imposter syndrome, and will share how data literacy can help by giving you a starting point that relates more to your own context and needs. About the speaker Simon is the co-founder of Mission Drive a digital agency that helps companies develop and implement growth strategies and data literacy programmes. With a background in business psychology, Simon has worked in data, business development and training for over 16 years. This includes leading the learning programme at the Open Data Institute (where he continues to work as an associate consultant), and the launch of Harvard Business School’s first European office.
watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQYdksc8W44&list=PL6DDzoHu1cx1ozmghXXCgzwHF8Ln8Tlv8&index=4&t=0s
This talk will present a PhD research project, which is looking at how communities employ data-driven approaches to address urban sustainability issues in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Over the past year, Roza Vasileva, PhD Candidate at the University of Nottingham, has conducted expert interviews with 25 representatives from various stakeholder groups of the Tanzanian data ecosystem: government, donor institutions, local community organisations, start-ups, international experts and academia. This project aims to understand what processes take place on the ground when people try to take advantage of data and technology to transform Dar es Salaam into a ‘smarter city’, and what the challenges are. This PhD research is funded by Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training in My Life in Data and supported by the Open Data Institute. The Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) is based at The University of Nottingham and is supported by a £9.3 million investment from Research Councils UK, The University of Nottingham and over 30 industry partners. About the speaker Roza Vasileva is a PhD candidate in Digital Economy with a focus on using data for citizen-centric smart cities at the Horizon Center for Doctoral Training, University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Roza has been an Open Data and Urban Innovations Consultant to the World Bank since 2012 and supported Open Government Data and Digital Government projects in over a dozen countries including Tanzania, Mauritius, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Lucia, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. As part of this work, she conducted and co-authored Open Data Readiness Assessments (ODRA) following the World Bank standard diagnostic methodology. Her research area includes using data especially open government data and citizen-generated urban data for designing citizen-centric smart sustainable cities. Currently she is conducting field work in Tanzania and Kenya looking at the data-driven community initiatives and how they are contributing towards smart urban transformation. She earned her undergraduate degree in Public Relations from Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia in St. Petersburg and a dual master’s degree in Public Administration and International Affairs at Maxwell School of Syracuse University as a Fulbright Scholar.
ODI Fridays are free lunchtime lectures for everyone. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk. We talk about smart homes as if they had already become a reality but for many they are a worrying trend towards data being hoovered up for advertising purposes elsewhere. Based on her book ‘Smarter Homes: how technology will change your home life’ author and designer Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino will speak about the relationships between people and technological advancements that have shaped our home lives and what this latest trend of ‘smart homes’ tells us about the future. About the speaker Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is an interaction designer, product designer, entrepreneur based in London. She was named 1st in a list of 100 Internet of Things Influencers (Postscapes, 2016), 2nd in Top 100 Internet of Things Thought Leaders (Onalytica, 2014) and in the Top 100 Influencial Tech Women on Twitter (Business Insider, 2014), Smith & Williamson Power 100 (2017). She is the founder of the Good Night Lamp, connected lamps for your global friends and family. She is also the Director of designswarm a strategic consultancy focusing on the internet of things. Some of her clients include BBC R&D, P&G, British Gas, EDF R&D and Nominet, British Telecom and others. She is @iotwatch on Twitter
This talk highlights the findings in a foundational piece of analysis by Ctrl-Shift of the economic opportunities for the UK economy of personal data mobility, the market challenges and a framework to design for trust. Personal data mobility is a significant economic and policy issue. Enabling personal data to flow between entities in a trusted and lawful manner, that protects and respects the data protection rights of individuals, is widely recognised as critical to the growth of digital economies and the unlocking of significant public and social value. Data portability as laid out in GDPR lays out an important new right, however it opens up new risks and yet unproven impact on value creation or human behaviour change towards their data sharing. Data mobility provides the rails to make this market safe, easy and valuable, the key elements needed for market success. About the speaker Liz Brandt, CEO, Ctrl-Shift Liz has over 20 years experience in consulting and has spent the last 16 building and running innovative businesses that focus primarily on the digital interaction between business and consumers. Throughout here career Liz has worked both in and for large corporates and has developed deep skills and strong networks across private, public and the 3rd sectors. Since the beginning of her career Liz has worked at the disruptive edge, where business and technology meet. She brings deep and strong experience in the impact on business models and operating environments of the shifting landscape of consumers, digital, trust and value. Liz combines vision married with evidence and market knowledge, business strategy and operational implementation and the ability to bring together strong teams to deliver extraordinary results. Ctrl-Shift The opportunities for organisations arising from a new personal information economy are game changing. Ctrl-Shift is the world’s leading market analyst and consulting business helping organisations to capitalise on these opportunities. As trusted personal information sharing becomes central to the creation of digital value, we work with market leading organisations providing evidence, insight and advice to make sense of market trends, identify and size market opportunities, and lead innovation and change programmes for efficiency and growth.
Governments and publicly accountable bodies routinely make complex decisions that directly influence huge numbers of people – everything from future climate policy, transport planning and local budgets to pivoting an entire police force. But how do you meaningfully engage the public in decision making when there are numerous factors in play, complex constraints and different options for policy and service delivery? Asking the public: ‘Do you want us to spend more on roads or social care?’ is meaningless if you don’t have the context or expertise to respond. Delib has been directly addressing these challenges with online deliberation for years, as a way of breaking down some of the boundaries; increasing citizen participation in useful, well-informed processes. Ben’s talk will draw upon recent and historic projects to highlight the benefits, pitfalls and peculiarities involved. About the speaker Ben Fowkes is Commercial Director at Delib, a digital democracy company founded in 2001 that’s worked on everything from political satire to major policy crowdsourcing websites for the Whitehouse. He’s an experienced consultant that works with governments around the world, helping to design and implement digital platforms for public participation. Ben has delivered more talks than you’ve had hot dinners, and has strong opinions lightly held.
In a humanitarian emergency, maps save lives. MapAction is a UK based charity that provides expert mapping and information management support in the wake of emergencies all over the world. Consisting mostly of volunteers, MapAction aims to be on the ground within 48 hours, gathering information and making maps to ensure the right help gets to the most vulnerable people as soon as possible. Johnny Henshall will introduce what MapAction do, how they work and his experiences of being a volunteer for them. About the speaker Johnny Henshall is a MapAction volunteer currently training to become a deployable member of the team. As with the majority of MapAction’s volunteers, Johnny’s background is in Geographical Information Systems (GIS), in which he has a masters and 5 years experience. In recent years, Johnny has moved into web analytics and now works in the digital team at the British Red Cross. He is also an active member in the London Missing Maps community. In 2017, Johnny visited Nepal with MapAction to host a Missing Maps event aimed at mapping areas affected by flooding. MapAction fast facts Two current deployments Over 78 emergency responses attended 12 staff and over 80 volunteers Ready to deploy in 48 hours Responded to emergencies in 34 countries Training and preparedness activities in 19 countries
Headlines about the BBC’s Local News Partnership with regional publishers have focused on the employment of 150 journalists to cover council news across the UK. But another part of the Partnership is breaking new ground too — seconding journalists from the regional Press into the BBC to work with BBC journalists in a shared data unit, which is already generating agenda-setting stories through the UK Peter Sherlock will describe how the Local News Partnership fits into the UK’s data journalism landscape and the different models he sees. He will also describe the LNP’s commitment to transparency and how data sets are shared About the speaker Pete brings a passion for local content and an appetite to bring new ways of sourcing and telling stories to the role of Assistant Editor at the Shared Data Unit. He began his career working across several regional newspapers in London, before joining the BBC in 2010, where he has worked as a reporter, sub-editor and news editor for the website. Last year, Pete helped launched the Shared Data Unit, an innovative partnership between the BBC and the regional press
Zamila Bunglawala, JRF Fellow in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and Deputy Director of the Cabinet Office Race Disparity Unit, will be presenting the world’s first website to detail all Government data by ethnicity, published and unpublished, highlighting disparities between ethnic groups across areas including education, employment, health, housing and criminal justice. Developed in collaboration with academics, open data experts, community groups, NGOs central and local Government colleagues and members of the public, the talk will cover the following: Highlight how extensive user testing with diverse groups across the UK identified ways to make the presentation and navigation of the website data more accessible; Discuss if digitising data – focusing on open data quality, trust and users – empowers users, informs or transforms policy and programs, improves access, transparency and benefits experts, NGOs and services to tackle ethnic disparities and improve outcomes. Explore strategic questions currently in the open data space including who are the users; who can open data measure impact; challenge the inequalities data infrastucture and highlight policies developed. About the speaker Zamila is JRF Fellow in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and Deputy Director of the Race Disparity Audit in the Cabinet Office delivering the Prime Minister’s priority project and Ethnicity facts and figures website, a pioneering open data project, unprecedented in scale, scope and transparency. Through her national and international policy, strategy and programmes experience leading in senior roles – including No.10 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, United Nations in Darfur, Sudan and Kathmandu, Nepal, Open Society Foundation, Brookings Institution and Young Foundation. She sits on the boards of UNESCO-UK, UK Research Institute, Concern Worldwide and Concern UK, and is a Fellow at both the London School of Economics and University of Manchester.
About the speaker Alistair Gentry is a writer and artist, currently research artist in residence at the ODI. Previous residencies include the ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh, and Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Many of his art projects are the result of extensive research in particular places, subjects and communities, sometimes over the course of many years. He also likes silly costumes, museums, absurdity, visiting the uncanny valley, and making machines do things their manufacturers wouldn’t approve of.
The Reform team will be presenting the findings of their report Sharing the benefits: how to use data effectively in the public sector, published this summer. The report demonstrates the potential of data sharing to transform the delivery of public services and improve outcomes for citizens. It explores how government can overcome various challenges to ‘get data right’ and enable better use of personal data within and between public-sector organisations. About the speakers Luke Heselwood is a Researcher at Reform and is particularly interested in policy areas related to social justice. He has co-authored reports on data sharing in the public sector and the use of blockchain for identity management. Before joining Reform, Luke was awarded a PhD from the University of Manchester, looking at the impact of Anglo-Chinese relations on 19th century British liberal ideas. Eleonora Harwich is Director of Research and Head of Digital and Tech Innovation at Reform think tank. Her work focuses on how tech innovations can help public services deliver better outcomes for people. She has particular interest in the public-sector applications of artificial intelligence (AI). She has led and co-authored papers on AI in the NHS and data sharing in the public sector. She is a member of the AI Programme advisory board for the Kent, Surrey, Sussex Academic Health Science Network. She is also the London Hub Lead of One HealthTech a volunteer-led network that seeks to promote diversity in healthtech.
Hear Carl Malamud of Public Resource share his efforts to make knowledge more broadly available on the Internet.
Carl will discuss the battle to make government databases of patents, laws, and corporate filings available as well as a global campaign to make public safety codes mandated by law available to the public. Carl will also share his current efforts in India to make works of government, technical knowledge, and scientific knowledge available for all to use.
About the speaker Carl Malamud is founder of Public.Resource.Org, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that has been instrumental in making public information, such as laws, available to the public. Carl created the first radio station on the Internet, is the author of 9 books, and is the recipient of the EFF Pioneer Award and Harvard University’s Berkman Award.
ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture: Adapting to the needs of modern data and intelligence work by The Open Data Institute
The Data Science Campus at the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) works at the frontier of data science and AI – building skills and applying tools, methods and practices – to create new understanding and improve decision-making for the public good. Its goals are to investigate the use of new data sources, including administrative data and big data, and to help build data science capability in the UK. The talk will show how data science is being used across government to support policy-making, operations, public services and statistics. Along with examples of data science saving over £500 million, the talk will explore how to support data science teams and build their capacity. This talk follows last week’s, from Darren Barnes of ONS and Dr Bill Roberts of Swirrl about their work across the Government Statistical Service to help people find, understand and use government statistical data.
About the speaker Tom Smith is Managing Director at the Data Science Campus, joining the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2017. Tom has more than 20 years’ experience using data and analysis to improve public services. Working at the intersection of government, academia and industry, he has led data and research projects with hundreds of local and national public and community sector organisations, including the government’s English Indices of Deprivation. His primary research interests are in using data science to improve public services, machine learning, and assessing non-traditional data sources to improve our understanding of society and the economy. Follow @_datasmith on Twitter.
Do you work with data in government, provide it to government or use government data? In this lunchtime lecture, hear from ONS and Swirrl about their work on a project that reaches across the Government Statistical Service and aims to support you in finding, understanding and using government statistical data.
The project flips the traditional way of organising government data on its head and considers data in terms of families: groups of related data collections, rather than in terms of which organisation it comes from. Its aim is to break down the barriers to finding, understanding and applying data from related datasets and to make collaborative work possible through comparable and interoperable data.
About the speakers Dr Bill Roberts is CEO of Swirrl, the Data Publishers, and is an enthusiast for using the Web to share public sector data more effectively. As well as working with Swirrl on various government open data projects, he is an active member of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Interest Group, where he is currently leading work on ‘Statistics on the Web Best Practices’.
When data is used effectively it can affect how we pay our tax, draw pensions and get our bins collected. New service delivery models – an Open Data Institute (ODI) project – was started in 2017 to increase the understanding of data-enabled service delivery models in local government, and to improve services encourage publishing more open data to improve public services. As part of the project, we awarded funding to four forward-thinking local government organisations to develop open data projects which explore how data could be used to improve public services – making them more efficient, innovative and citizen-focused. Since the beginning of the project, four local councils have redesigned services for their local communities by using open data The project is part of the ODI’s £6M three-year innovation programme, which has an overall aim to build data infrastructure, improve data literacy, stimulate data innovation and build trust in the use of data. In this talk ODI Consultant Izy Champion will talk you through the research, give examples of the innovative services created through the innovative use of data, and talk about opportunities to get involved with our project for 2018-19 looking at Service design learning materials About the speaker Izy joined the ODI as a Consultant in November 2017. She is working across our Research and Development programme, including as the lead on the ODI’s work on peer-to-peer accommodation, as well as working with our commercial partners. Her expertise covers service design, innovation and facilitation. She has a background in research and community engagement, and as a result she loves getting people excited about data. Before joining the ODI Isabelle worked in the social housing sector for 5 years, most recently as a Research and Innovation Lead at Viridian Housing. During her time there she led a range of projects including research on welfare reform, process mapping work across the business, and winning the Housing Series of the Open Data Challenge Series along with her team. Izy has an LLB in Law and French Law from University College London, and is currently studying for an MSc in Policy Research from the University of Bristol. When not reading about feminism and social justice, she takes pretentious film photographs and makes her own clothes.
Bad data is everywhere. A CSV that doesn’t load, a spreadsheet that is badly formatted, a date column that has different formats, and so on. A lot of time is spent fixing these issues, instead of actually analysing the data. In this talk, you’ll hear about Good Tables, a tabular data validator that is able to check for issues like: All rows have the same number of columns There are no duplicate rows The data types are correct (e.g. a numeric column has only numbers, a date column has only dates in a specific format, etc.) It also allows writing custom checks using Python. Goodtables is useful both if you are a data publisher, by helping you to increase your data quality and facilitate the data reusability, and if you are a data user, by giving you a quick way to check the data for errors. It can be executed locally or via https://goodtables.io, a continuous tabular data validation service. You’ll also understand about how the Frictionless Data’s Data Package and Table Schema specifications can help you describe and load datasets. About the speaker Vitor Baptista is the engineering lead for the Open Knowledge International. Since joining in 2012, he worked on a range of projects related to open data, like building data portals using CKAN, improving fiscal transparency with OpenSpending, aggregating and releasing clinical trial data with OpenTrials, and more. His main interests are in how we can use data and data visualization to make better decisions to improve the world. He is currently based in Birmingham, UK.
In this emotive talk, author Graham Hogg shares his frontline experience of leading teams in Afghanistan and how connecting decision making to data enabled teams to adapt and overcome challenges. https://seeingaroundcorners.com/
About the speaker Graham began his career as a Royal Marines Commando Officer, specialising in Intelligence. Working in Afghanistan, the Southern Arabian Gulf and Sierra Leone, this experience led him to the belief that the level of cognitive diversity and connectivity in teams fuels understanding. He believes that in the data rich and complex business world leaders face today, using this to build understanding is and will continue to be the source of competitive advantage. As leader of Connectworxs, he is passionate about helping teams achieve foresight, by connecting their questions to data to business value, and sharing those insights across organisational silos. This will drive growth for organisations and build the right data-driven culture.
Watch a video of Graham's lecture here https://youtu.be/paojVUhcMfA
We interview Jean-Noé Landry, Executive Director at Open North about his experiences of working with open standards for data
We interview Juan Pane, Technical Co-ordinator at the Latin America Open Data Initiative about his experience of working with open standards for data.
We interview Serah Rono, Developer Advocate at Open Knowledge about her experiences of working with open standards for data
We interview Matthew Wood-Hill of the Future Cities Catapult about his experiences of working with open standards for data
We interview Tim Davies of Open Data Services about his experiences of working with open standards for data
We interview Mike Thacker, Owner of Porism Ltd, about his experiences of working with open standards for data
We interview Tim McGarr, Market Development Manager for Digital at the BSI about his experiences of working with open standards for data
We interview Rachel Rank, CEO of 360 Giving about her experiences of working with open standards for data
You can find Roland's slides here https://www.slideshare.net/rolandharwood/mind-the-gap-where-the-suits-meet-the-sneakers-90083493
In this interactive lunchtime talk, Roland Harwood will describe the challenges and opportunities of corporate and start-up collaboration. By providing a range of practical case studies from the likes of LEGO, UBS, and Ford, he will share lessons learned and practical tools for combining and aligning cultures, data and processes to create valuable new partnerships and networks. About the speaker Roland Harwood is Co-founder and Managing Director at 100%Open, the global open innovation agency that works with the likes of LEGO, Ford, Unilever, UBS, Oxfam and Governments around the world to co-innovate with their partners. It was a spin-out from NESTA in 2010, the UK Innovation Agency and Investment Fund, where he was Director of Open Innovation. Graduating with a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University, he has held senior innovation roles in the public and private sector. In addition has worked with hundreds of start-ups to raise venture capital and commercialise technology. He is both a failed astronaut and a keen piano player and has produced TV and film music for SonyBMG. Last but not least, he is a proud and often exhausted dad of three kids under 10.
With the UK leaving the EU one of the key issues facing the tech sector is how to ensure data can continue to flow between the UK and EU post-Brexit. The free flow of data is crucial to the tech sector, and many other industries.
There are a number of options available but only one that represents a suitable solution for the entire economy. The UK and EU must seek mutual adequacy decisions, and during the talk Jeremy Lilley, techUK’s Policy Manager, will explain why, what that is and how to go about it.
About the speaker Jeremy is a Policy Manager at techUK, responsible for techUK’s work on Data Protection policy, including the incoming General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy and International Data Transfers. He also leads techUK’s Intellectual Property and Copyright work, including the Intellectual Property Policy Group, as well as being involved in techUK’s policy work on Brexit and online platforms, amongst other tech policy areas.
Open Banking will introduce a new level of competition, one for the attention of banking customers. In a world where customers can get their banking data analysed anywhere, why would they choose their bank? Jamie from Bud will share insights and practical product information on how to deliver more value to customers and compete in this new world.
This talk is useful for anyone responsibly for open banking strategies, innovation departments and banks, or anyone looking to take advantage of new data sets, in transactional data, and offering their customers financial services.
Bud is the financial network, connecting over 70 fintech and financial services into one platform. Banks leverage Bud’s marketplace and aggregation tools to offer new experiences to their customers.
About the speaker Jamie Campbell's main focus is on increasing awareness of Bud and its partners. As one of the first employees at the company he has helped build a strong customer base and has helped develop new banking relationships. He is also a faculty member of the Finance Innovation Lab’s fellowship programme. Before Bud, Jamie worked in Advertising as a strategist for clients such as Coca-cola, Heineken and SSE.
Research released by Deloitte in October this year showed that the release of open data by Transport for London (TfL) is generating annual economic benefits and savings of up to £130m a year
For almost ten years, TfL has been releasing a significant amount of open data, from air quality information to wifi access points, allowing developers and partners to bring new products and services to market more quickly.
TfL has worked with a wide range of professional and amateur developers, ranging from start-ups to global innovators, to deliver new products in the form that customers want. This has led to more than 600 apps now being powered specifically using TfL's open data feeds, used by 42 per cent of Londoners.
Rikesh Shah, Head of Commercial Innovation at TfL, will talk about their open data journey, how open data has created an eco-system of innovators. Rikesh will also highlight the successful factors and outcomes around start-up engagement with corporates and some of the challenges around procurement.
About the speaker Rikesh Shah is the Head of Commercial Innovation at Transport for London, the authority responsible for delivering the London Mayor’s transport strategy. He has been at TfL for over 16 years, previously in the areas of commercial development, communications and digital.
He is responsible for creating value in the future mobility space from market innovators including start ups, academics, transport operators, regional agencies, R&D organisations and corporates. This involves on-going engagement with this community, utilising the right procurement processes, developing the right culture and providing the right level of access to data and policy makers.
Previous to this role, Rikesh led TfL’s open data programme, digital commercial activity, stakeholder engagement and communications supporting TfL’s digital transformation strategy. By building digital and data partnerships with start- ups, as well as leading technology platforms including Twitter, Amazon and Google, Rikesh has been at the forefront of TfL’s Open Data provision to over 13,000 developers producing over 600 customer facing travel apps used by 42% of Londoners. This has placed customer digital at the core of TfL’s business.
Using data as the seed in their creative process, Kultur Design produce art, design and visualisation that has the uniqueness and serendipity of the data embedded within it.
In this talk, Mike Brondbjerg from Kultur Design will look at how data, in one form or another, connects many of Kultur Design’s projects, and how they've visualised data in very different, creative ways.
This talk might interest data viz developers looking for some inspiration, or motion / graphic designers wanting to learn about using data and generative processes in creative projects.
About the speaker Mike Brondbjerg is a partner at Kultur Design, a creative studio specialising in using data, both creatively and analytically, in information and generative design projects, data visualisation and data art.
Kultur Design produce print, motion and web projects for clients like Kano Computers, Datameer, Heineken, Reasons To, Abbott Laboratories & King’s College.
Mike has spoken about his creative data projects previously at various conferences & meetups, including: ReasonsTo Conference, Visualising Data London, Data + Visual, University of Greenwich, University of Lincoln and The Financial Times.
The Open Data Leaders Network connects and supports a peer network of data pioneers in governments from all around the world. In this podcast, we look at the African Open Data Leaders Network, a regional variation of the programme that took place this year in Accra, Ghana. We hear from Fiona Smith about the methodology behind the programme, and from various open data leaders on the continent about their experience, and the main obstacles they face in advocating for open data in the region.
This talk will outline the recent work of BAFTA-winning artist Dan Hett around encryption issues and technologies, including a detailed examination of his recent ODI commission: two large, vibrant paintings that each contain a securely encrypted (but boldly painted) transmission, created for the ODI's upcoming LMAO exhibition and marking the beginning of a new arc of work.
The key to unlocking the encrypted messages is stored on an RFID chip, which was implanted directly into the artist's hand earlier this year, making the content stored within these works accessible only to him. The talk will look at the on-site production of the works at the ODI, and will discuss the issues and ethics around current government policy around encryption technology, which gained particular significance for the artist when he became directly involved in the Manchester terror attack in May 2017. Although the themes and issues discussed are rooted in technology, this talk will be completely suitable for everyone.
Please note: Dan will discuss potentially distressing themes around the Manchester attack, and the talk will also contain a few images of an implant being put into skin.
you can watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8KgiJM_348
About the speaker Dan Hett is a BAFTA-winning artist and creative technologist from Manchester, currently working as a selected artist on FutureEverything's cutting-edge FAULT LINES program.
Most UK local authorities have embraced the concept of open data, slowly but surely opening up new data sets. Andy Radford, Transport Planner at Birmingham City Council, had a very different experience. Let him take you back to 2014...
"My colleague had masterminded a successful bid for a European Project, Opticities, and then abruptly left the organisation. My task was to open up real-time transport datasets in a matter of months, with very little budget and no background in open data.
"What followed did not follow a traditional route – the only goal was to get the data from our internal systems onto the internet as quickly as possible. Once that was done, I entered a world completely unfamiliar to the average local authority transport planner – working in partnership with SME’s, Universities, the ODI etc.
"The session will be particularly appropriate for local authority staff, but anyone working with open data or in the transport field should learn something useful. Not everything was a bed of roses - I learned some lessons the hard way, so that you won’t have to.
"This talk will tell a heart-warming tale of what can be achieved in the local authority environment with people who are willing to learn and have a can-do attitude."
About the speaker Andy Radford has worked as a transport planner at Birmingham City Council for 17 years. In his current role as Principal Infrastructure Delivery Officer, he has responsibility for a number of grant funded transport research and innovation projects, focussed in the field of intelligent mobility.
Over the past two years we have seen swaths of manufacture attempt to bribe us with technology to “make our lives better”. As a result we now have big technology manufacturers competing to be our virtual assistants with smart speakers.
In this lecture lecture ODI Data Scientist David Tarrant looks at how these platforms are competing and producing a confusing set of services and why simple to use open standards are going to be the key to winning in the home automation market.
“OK Google, tell Alexa to ask Siri to book me a place on this amazing sounding lecture!”
About the speaker David joined the ODI from the University of Southampton where he was a Lecturer in the Web and Internet Science Group. He was responsible for creating the world's first undergraduate course in open data.
Since joining the ODI David has put in place key educational content that has helped transform governments and unlock over $15m for startups. Additionally David has applied his data science skills to build policy making tools for open data leaders, including the Open Data Barometer visualisation. This tool has been used to guide policy development and allow leaders to compare and contrast their open data initiatives with other similar initiatives globally.
As Learning Skills Lead, David is responsible for the direction and quality of the ODI's learning offering. Products include face to face training, eLearning and the ODI's Learning Records System (LRS). Underpinned by the skills framework, all of these products put together ensure that the ODI can offer high quality online and face to face training to as many people as possible.
Data standards almost always have two fundamental components: syntax and semantics.
The syntax is established by a schema, which specifies how the data should be structured. Should it be saved as XML, JSON, CSV? Should dates be written YYYY-MM-DD? What order should the columns be in? These types of questions are essential and catered for in most well-established data standards.
Semantics are more abstract. Questions arise, like: what does this data tell me about the world? What does this number mean? What is the purpose of that transaction? Answering these is more variable and often less formal than the syntax. The most common and trusted technique is to create a codelist – a dictionary of terms which establishes the semantics for a given data point. They can be simple sets of terms – detailing transaction types which can be published in a standard – all the way to rich hierarchical taxonomies. They all associate a code with a meaning, to allow people to communicate with them.
This talk explores the changing role of codelists in a time when textual data analysis is advancing rapidly. The root question is this: is it still best to start giving meaning to your data by looking for a codelist and a code, or can we use description text itself, trusting modern data analysis to do the heavy lifting?
First, we'll consider and contextualise the use of codelists within standards like Open Contracting, IATI, and 360Giving. Then we'll look at how meaning can be established in text where no standard exists – online reviews for restaurants, for example – by applying machine learning (live demo alert!). Finally, we'll apply the same approach to description text found in established open data standards and compare our results.
Rory Scott is a member of the Open Data Services Cooperative, working with national governments, multilateral organisations, and civil society to better share, understand, and use open data about international development and humanitarian financing. He does this primarily by talking to people about their data, writing Python and R code, and wrangling spreadsheets.
House prices are a popular topic of conversation in the UK.
Less popular is the rate the prices are increasing. The UK average house price has increased 30% since the 2008 crash, and London house prices have gone up 75%, according to the Land Registry House price index from September 2008 to September 2017. In London, price increases are often blamed on empty homes bought as investments by rich foreigners. Areas such as Cornwall and the Lake District blame price increases on holiday homes bought by rich Londoners. However, there is very little data supporting or against these beliefs.
Jonathan Bourne spent a year sending Freedom of Information requests to gather a dataset from over 100 local authorities. He was interested in data on 'low use properties', which are domestic properties that contain no full-time resident. The data covers 22 million people and 330,000 low-use properties. The data shows a clear relationship between price and low-use properties.
In this talk, Jonathan will discuss his findings, showing how London is affected in the same way as the rest of the country and that building more houses may not help solve the problem of high prices. He will also describe how he got the data and what he learned about the Freedom of Information Act.
Jonathan Bourne is a data scientist who previously worked in the energy industry and is currently studying for a PhD in Complex Networks at University College London. When he has the time, he blogs on SomeSquaredError.
A study by the Consumer Market Authority showed that older and larger banks do not have to compete hard enough for customers’ business, and smaller and newer banks find it difficult to grow. This means that many people are paying more than they should for their banking activities and are not benefiting from new services.
As a result, Open Banking was set up in September 2016 to enable personal customers and small businesses to share their data securely with other banks and with third parties, allowing them to compare products on the basis of their own requirements and to manage their accounts without having to use their bank.
To deliver Open Banking, a new organisation was created - the Open Banking Implementation Entity – which is funded by the nine largest current account providers in the UK (Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, Barclays, Danske, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, RBS Group, Santander), as well as Challenger Banks, Fintechs, Third Parties, Consumer Groups and other parties to define and develop the required Application Programme Interfaces (APIs), security and data standards that underpin Open Banking.
Imran Gulamhuseinwala OBE, Implementation Trustee of the Open Banking Implementation Entity will talk about the challenges and the progress made to date on Open Banking.
About the speaker Imran Gulamhuseinwala OBE was appointed as Trustee for the Open Banking Implementation Entity on 13 April 2017. In his role as Trustee, he has oversight and responsibility for Open Banking’s development and delivery of the common technical standards underpinning the Competition and Market Authority’s (CMA) open banking initiative.
He is seconded to Open Banking from Ernst & Young LLP (EY) where he is a London-based partner in its financial services practice. He is also EY’s Global Head of FinTech. He joined EY in 2014. At EY, he has worked closely with government, regulators and industry bodies to drive the FinTech agenda, leading studies for both UK Trade & Investment and HM Treasury to measure the size and growth of the FinTech sector in the UK and develop a strategy for future growth.
Prior to joining Open Banking, he has been involved with the Entity’s work through its stakeholder working groups and has been active in financial technology as both an investor and a start-up Founder.
He has worked in financial services for 18 years and spent eight years investing in the fintech sector. He is the co-founder of CommuterClub, a FinTech 50 start-up which helps commuters to access savings for annual travel season tickets.
He was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s Honours list for his contribution to the financial services Sector.
He has a Masters in Engineering from Cambridge University and is a CFA charter holder.
Corporations are often overwhelmed with the amount of information they create. IBM estimates that around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. The rise of big and open data has exposed the struggle to communicate insights to an untrained audience.
With the growth of open data, the challenge has grown from being able to analyse data to being able to share it in engaging ways. Applying practical steps can help you to use data in storytelling while creating a clear and convincing argument.
About the speaker Isabelle Marchand is a senior data journalist for Lloyds Banking Group (LBG). She has produced visualisations, infographics, interactive infographics and online tests for companies such as Dropbox, the Ford Motor Company and the World Bank. She has been a guest speaker at a number of events including Viz-Fest and the Open Data Summit. Isabelle has completed a Master’s Degree in International Journalism at Brunel University, as well as a Master’s Degree in Written Press at the French Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Paris.
AI Expert Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt will be asking whether the open data movement has succeeded and what the next steps should be to secure its foundation for our economies and societies
We have seen many achievements in open data, by governments and NGOs, large corporates and startups, collectives and individuals. This talk will reflect on and review some of these achievements and look to the future, asking questions like ‘How does open data relate to data that is closed or shared?’ and ‘Does open data help us empower individuals?’
About the speaker Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is Chairman and Co-Founder of the Open Data Institute. He is also Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Head of the Web and Internet Science Group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. With over 400 publications he has researched on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. He was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science and is a Director of the Web Science Trust which seeks to advance our understanding of the Web and promote the Web’s positive impact on society.
In 2009 the Prime Minister appointed him and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as Information Advisors to transform access to Public Sector Information. This work led to the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk site that now provides a portal to over 9,000 datasets.
In May 2010 he was asked by the UK Coalition Government to join the Public Sector Transparency Board – this oversees Open Data releases across the public sector. In April 2011 he became Chair of the UK Government’s midata programme – whose goal is to empower consumers by releasing their data back to them. In the November 2011 Autumn statement he was awarded £10M funding via the Technology Strategy Board to set up the Open Data Institute with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
With technology becoming ever more widely used in our daily activities, our digital footprints are getting bigger. Our online activities are being captured – from shopping to socialising – and creating an unprecedented number of data points. More and more companies are creating and selling their products with customer demographics in mind.
Central to this issue the control and use of personal data - and how people's privacy and personal data are being protected. Yet legislative protections and practices are often weak, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where much of the world's population is just getting online.
This discussion will present the challenges to developing and enforcing data protection legislation in such countries, drawing on recent research compiled by the Web Foundation.
About the speaker Craig leads the Web Foundation’s policy work across our digital equality and citizen participation programmes. He brings to the role a wealth of expertise in governance, transparency, development, and using technology for social change.
Leasehold Knowledge Partnership's (LKP) data journey began in 2014 when they discovered that the government estimate of about 2 million leasehold homes in England and Wales was totally wrong. In the first half of 2014 they worked with the government to allow them to agree a new "official" estimate of 4.1 million privately owned leasehold homes in England as at 2012/13.
The data in this sector has been so poor in the past that fundamental misconceptions have been allowed to develop. The government believed leasehold was somehow a lower cost form of tenure. They thought that almost 50% of properties were overseen by regulated professional property managers.
We now know that leasehold construction has grown to become almost 50% of all new housing stock.
Martin and Sebastian, Trustees of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, explain how the unreliable data came about and how this has meant until recently many of our housing policies have been predicated on entirely false assumptions.
The journey to uncovering much of the detailed leasehold data is ongoing and will need the support of the Land Registry and others.
About the speakers Both Sebastian O’Kelly and Martin Boyd act as Trustees of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and now also act as the Secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Leasehold and Commonhold reform.
The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership is a charity incubated by the ODI.
Journalists have been slow to approach open data as a source of information, often relying on traditional approaches such as Freedom of Information requests.
In 2015, Jonathan Stoneman wrote a working paper “Does Open Data Need Journalism?” to show how things were slowly changing. With projects such as OpenCorporates and OpenPrescribing, access to data for journalists was becoming easier than ever.
But is it enough? And have there been too many missed opportunities for open data and journalism to truly live happily ever after?
About the speaker Jonathan Stoneman is an ODI Registered Trainer, specialising in data journalism. He was a BBC journalist for 20 years, culminating as Head of World Service Training. Data work is the element of his freelance work which he enjoys most: he has delivered training to more than 600 BBC journalists, and likes nothing more than to curl up on his sofa with a good dataset!
How has Brexit influenced the UK’s transparency regime and how, in turn, will openness will shape Brexit? There are three ways of looking at Brexit and open government: 1) possible changes to old policies and new ones being pushed, 2) the new Prime Minister either championing transparency or supporting secrecy, and 3) the openness of the Brexit process itself, which has so far struggled between the executive’s secretive prerogative powers and the legislature’s rights to know.
May’s government will be seen as one that prized secrecy but conceded openness, an object (and abject) lesson in how hard it is to keep government closed in the 21st century. The May administration 2016–2017 is likely to be remembered as a secretive one, headed by a Prime Minister that wished to govern through confidentiality and closed networks. There were some high-profile openness policies, but they were inherited and slow.
In this lecture, Ben Worthy will explain how Brexit shows how badly the approach misfired. The government’s plan of no ‘running commentary’ and secrecy was undermined by the Supreme Court, the UK Parliament and the EU Commission – who all forced greater transparency and greatly limited May’s room for manoeuvre and concealment. The three institutions – creating and using ‘institution friction’ to open up government – also exposed the government’s lack of preparation and undermined the UK’s credibility and leverage even before Brexit began.
Speaker biography Ben Worthy is a lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written extensively on issues around Transparency, Openness and Freedom of Information including co-authoring the book Does FOI Work? His latest book is ‘The Politics of Freedom of Information: How and Why Governments Pass Laws That Threaten Their Power’ (Manchester: MUP) and you can read an extract here.
He is also researching the impact of the UK Government’s Transparency Agenda and is also the Independent Reporter on the UK’s Open Government National Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership. He was previously Research Associate in Freedom of Information at UCL’s Constitution Unit.
From real estate in Estonia to search and rescue in Ireland, find out how the OpenGovIntelligence project aims to use open data to improve the way government works.
The OpenGovIntelligence project is a three year EU funded research project involving twelve partners from seven countries. It aims to demonstrate how better use of data and ‘co-creation’ of public services leads to benefits for citizens and businesses. The project involves 6 pilots, each with two partners: a technical partner tasked with developing software tools and preparing and publishing the appropriate open data, and a public sector partner with understanding of public service challenges, who will test out the new approaches in a practical setting.
Speaker biography Sarah Roberts works on communications, training, strategy and events for Swirrl, the data publishers. She leads Swirrl’s dissemination of the OpenGovIntelligence project to help maximise its impact.
Until now some people have been looking at and analysing certain pockets of that data, but nobody has taken impact data for the whole sector and put it in one structured place. In this talk, CEO and Co-founder of SoGive, Sanjay Joshi, will talk about the challenges of creating a suitable data structure for something that is intrinsically hard to quantify, how to create a social enterprise and a business from a dataset, and how this data could help individual charity donors make more of an impact.
About the speaker Sanjay Joshi is CEO and Co-Founder of SoGive, a tool that enables charities to measure their impact on the world. He has been active in the charity sector for the last 15 years, having been on the board of around half a dozen charities, provided consultancy services for a few weeks at a time for around half a dozen charities across the globe, and has been involved in around half a dozen groups to encourage philanthropy. He has previously worked in a niche strategy consultancy and for a major credit ratings agency, among other financial roles.
We often associate open data with the publication of data by governments and businesses. But openly licensed data is also being collected, curated and maintained by a variety of communities across the web.
Whether you're interested in music or maps, comics or comets there are ways that we can all contribute directly to the creation of some unique open datasets.
In this talk I'll be exploring some of those projects to highlight their work, how they're being used and thinking about what they can teach us about building a sustainable open data commons.
About Leigh Dodds Leigh is an experienced software engineer, product manager and technical consultant. He spent 10 years working in the publishing industry dealing with data integration and management issues. As CTO of Publishing Technology’s scholarly division, Leigh was responsible for designing an innovative publishing framework based on semantic web technology. On moving to Talis Group in 2011, Leigh looked after their “Data as a Service” products, overseeing product development and launching their Linked Data consulting business.
Come join Matt Laessig, COO and co-founder of data.world, as he talks about the open data in government movement in the United States.
Showcasing some of the work data.world has done with key federal organisations like the US Census, the Department of Defense, and the White House, Matt will talk about how data.world has helped to make data more accessible and drive more collaboration and a more engaged community around it.
He'll trace its history from its origins – in the Presidential Memo out of a newly minted President Obama's office on the first day of his new administration – to the role of data.gov as a platform for agencies and departments to share their data. We'll also briefly discuss key legislation, including the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) focused on transparency in financial reporting, as well as the Open Government Data Act, which is currently before Congress and would codify requirements for a new more rigorous open data programme in the federal government.
Please note: This lunchtime lecture is taking place on a Wednesday, not our usual Friday slot.
About Matt Laessig Matt Laessig is the co-founder and COO of data.world, a leading collaboration and community platform which makes it easier for people to work on data projects.
Matt has been an entrepreneur and executive in the technology industry for the last 20 years. Previous to data.world, Matt held multiple leadership roles at HomeAway, the world’s leading vacation rental marketplace, including as Vice President of Global Business Development and General Manager of BedandBreakfast.com. HomeAway was acquired by Expedia in December of 2015 for $3.9 billion, making it the largest acquisition in the history of the online travel category. Prior to HomeAway, Matt served as Vice President of Business Development at Bazaarvoice, the global leader in social commerce solutions. Matt is a graduate of both the Wharton Business School (MBA, ’98) and the Lauder Institute of International Studies and Management (MA, ’98). Matt is also an eight-time competitor on NBC’s American Ninja Warrior, the world’s toughest obstacle course competition.
In November 2015, Gavin Chait set out to create a service that 66 local authorities claimed would cause a crime wave. After researching this and rejecting their conclusions, Gavin pursued the case through the Information Commissioner. In February 2017, a decision was reached, and he won.
Gavin was seeking to create a data service offering all entrepreneurs access to quality business intelligence usually only affordable to corporations. His first task was to secure the data he needed, and make it open.
Find out what happened next, and what Gavin Chait has learned from the data released from authorities which have finally been forced to publish.
About Gavin Chait Gavin Chait is an economist, engineer, data scientist, sometime-traveller, and author. He has written two science fiction novels, “Lament for the Fallen” published in 2016 and “Our Memory Like Dust” to be released on 27 July 2017. He has consulted on open data for the World Bank and WHO, and led open data projects as far afield as Tanzania, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico and Australia. He founded Pikhaya in 2015, and is currently working with the Gates Foundation and WHO on a global public health data-sharing project. He also drinks a great deal of coffee.
At the ODI Summit in November 2016, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke about the need for scrutiny in decision-making, saying ‘show me the data, show me its provenance’.
In this lunchtime lecture, Jamie Whyte will look at how linked data can be used to support this level of scrutiny. He’ll show us how combining documents on the internet (webpages, pdfs, visualisations, etc) with the web of data to allow evidence to be baked into narratives such as Government white papers, news articles, visualisations and more, enabling anyone to easily check the provenance of the data, and explore related datasets.
About the speaker Jamie is an ODI learning associate and led the Trafford Innovation Lab until the end of 2016, when he left to found Propolis Open Data Factory. He is currently working with Swirrl on helping public sector organisations to share and use their data more effectively. Category
One of the UK’s regulators, Ofcom, published new research on offensive language last year. It hit the headlines and was a nice opportunity for papers and websites to make cheap gags about swear words.
As well as opening up the opportunity to make cheap gags, it also gave our Head of Policy, Peter Wells, an opportunity to open up some data, talk to people about swear words and the importance of context, and to wonder whether that data can be used to make better decisions about swearing.
WARNING: Contains strong language
About Peter Wells Peter Wells is a open data policy expert and Head of Policy at the ODI.
Many birth defects are caused by gene mutations, which can prevent an embryo from developing as it should. Genetic heart conditions, for example, affect around 1% of all newborns, and in around 10 times as many cases they may lead to miscarriage. If we want to prevent or treat birth defects, it’s vital that we understand how different gene mutations affect embryos as they develop.
The DMDD (Deciphering the Mechanisms of Developmental Disorders) programme is tacking this issue by studying the effects of 240 different gene mutations in mouse embryos. In the spirit of open data, the project has made all its data freely available, to encourage collaboration and, ultimately, lead to better understanding of genetic disease.
About the speaker Dr Tim Mohun is a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in central London. His research group studies the genetic controls that regulate embryo development, focussing on how the heart is formed. Much of his work uses animal models such as the mouse. Tim also coordinates the DMDD programme.
Please note: The DMDD’s work is based on studies with mice and subscribe to the highest standards for animal welfare in their research. The lecture will include some examples of this work.
Libraries.io is a free utility that helps developers and maintainers make more informed decisions about the software they use. In this lunchtime lecture Ben takes a look at the techniques Libraries.io uses to ‘map the open source landscape’, presents some of the issues surrounding software development, distribution and packaging and finally talks about why Libraries.io is much more than a discovery service.
About the speaker Ben Nickolls is a software developer by training but a product person at heart. These days you’re just as likely to find him scrawling on an A3 pad as you are staring at a terminal. Outside of the office Ben enjoys designing board games and racing bicycles.
Open data can help local governments engage more with communities, improve public services and create opportunities for innovation. But how do they get started?
In this lecture, Lucy Knight will share how her team at Devon County Council got to grips with open data through training, trying cheap tools and making critical friends. Lucy will explain how they created an environment where good data is valued as a resource and the goal is to make it as useful as possible with a ‘fail fast, fail cheaply’ attitude and rapid prototyping. Along with some of DCC’s open data projects, Lucy will share some of the cultural and technical challenges they have met, and how they’re overcoming them.
About the speaker Lucy Knight is Data Lead for Devon County Council, co-founder of ODI Devon, and an ODI Training Associate.
t’s not currently possible to find a complete dataset on all charitable grants in the UK. 360Giving exists to change this. Its vision is that UK grantmaking is more informed, effective and strategic.
360Giving supports organisations to publish their grants data in an open, standardised way and helps people to understand and use the data in order to support decision-making and learning across the charitable giving sector. They’ve developed an open data standard as part of their work – the 360Giving Standard – and already some of the largest UK grantmakers are using it to share information about thousands of grants worth billions of pounds.
360Giving is also supporting the development of tools and platforms that allow easy access and use of the data, including Beehive Giving and GrantNav. As the dataset grows, they’re starting to test its usefulness via a series of data use pilots, starting in Manchester.
This lunchtime lecture will focus on 360’s progress so far, including challenges and lessons learned. The 360Giving team is also interested to hear from ODI staff about implementing behaviour change within organisations based on better access to information and open data.
About the speakers Rachel Rank is Chief Executive of 360Giving. She was formerly Deputy Director of Publish What You Fund, where she led its research and monitoring work. She has written widely on transparency, good governance and accountability, and held positions with the Commonwealth Secretariat, the UK Department for International Development, DAI, Transparency International and the Overseas Development Institute.
Katherine Duerden leads 360Giving’s outreach and engagement with grantmakers, supporting them to publish their grants data openly, and building partnerships to support more informed and strategic grantmaking. She was formerly Membership Relationship Manager for the Association of Charitable Foundations, where she was responsible for the recruitment and retention of foundations in membership, answering queries and overseeing the use and development of the CRM database. Katherine has previously held positions with the Eve Appeal, a cancer research fundraising charity and carers support organisation in Lambeth.
Museum collection catalogues are a perpetual work in progress. Over the years, they have evolved from straight-up inventory management to online publications with digitised images for all to see.
In early 2017 the Science Museum Group relaunched its online collection of digitised objects, under a Creative Commons licence via a public API. The museum hopes that the open data will be used in many ways. Researchers might use it to explore the collection using computation analysis, software programmers might use it to explore new interfaces and discovery tools for the collection, and creatives might use the data and images in their work.
This lecture will present the outcomes from a hack day held in February to bring together technologists, designers and creatives to experiment with how this open data could be used. The hack day was run as part of the museum’s Digital Lab initiative, supported by Samsung.
About the speakers John Stack is Digital Director of the Science Museum Group. He joined the group in 2015 and is responsible for setting and delivering the group’s digital strategy. Prior to joining the Science Museum Group, he was Head of Digital at Tate for ten years.
Dave Patten is Head of New Media at the Science Museum. He manages all aspects of new media from conceptual design to prototyping and production. He has a background in electronics and computer science, and has worked at the Science Museum for over 30 years.
Jamie Unwin is Technical Architect for the Science Museum’s Collection Online. Since building a web-based London Underground route finder for his BSc project in 1995, Jamie helped launch The Guardian website and later set up a platform used by the BBC, The Guardian, Sony Playstation and London 2012 Olympics. In 2015 he joined the Science Museum to wrangle data and systems to relaunch the collection website.
The digitisation of public collections has made great works of art available globally, at the click of a mouse. In this talk we’ll look at tax exempt art, Britain’s most obscure public art collection and ask what’s the future for open culture. About the speaker Jo Pugh is a research engineer and a member of the Centre for Digital Heritage at the University of York. He is the founder of Open Inheritance Art, a project to collect images of tax exempt art from around the UK.
Linet Kwamboka, coordinator of Kenya’s Open Data Initiative, and Sandra Elena, coordinator of the Open Justice Programme at Argentina’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, share stories from their experiences running open data initiatives and how we can improve equality of opportunity in data and tech.
In a post-truth world, where experts are dismissed and populism is on the rise, how do those of us that support openness in government fight back?
For at least the last ten years there has been growing support for the idea that greater government transparency and evidence-based policy making will improve the lives of citizens. This is now under threat.
In his talk, Robert Palmer will explore how the transparency and open data movements can work to defend the gains made to date and continue to make our institutions deliver for us.
About the speaker Robert Palmer, is the Partnerships and Communication Director for the Open Data Charter, a network of governments and organisations committed to achieving a world where data is used as a public good. Previously he was at Global Witness, where he led a global movement to expose how the financial system facilitates corruption.
We often talk about ‘evidence-based decision making’ or becoming ‘data-driven organisations’. But how much faith should we put in data? ODI CEO Jeni Tennison will look at how complex using data in decision making can be, and how, to get the best result, sometimes we should limit our use of data.
About Jeni Tennison Jeni Tennison is the CEO of the Open Data Institute. She gained her PhD from the University of Nottingham then worked as an independent consultant, specialising in open data publishing and consumption, before joining the ODI in 2012. Jeni was awarded an OBE for services to technology and open data in the 2014 New Year Honours.
With increasing accusations of ‘fake news’, spin and highly influential public relations flying around, data is becoming more widely used in stories to back up their claims with evidence their readers can verify.
How has data journalism developed? What are the challenges and opportunities that data can present to journalists? How easy is it for journalists to access useful data and build stories from it?
Londonist Editor James Drury will explore these questions, using real-life examples from Londonist.com and others, and whether the most important newsroom resource of the future could be Excel.
About James Drury
A journalist for 18 years, James is currently Editor in Chief at londonist.com, a website all about London. Through its editorial, videos, weekly podcast and daily newsletters it is read by two million people every month, and has almost two million social media followers.
Watch a video of the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raEEWlwfzUA&index=1&list=PL6DDzoHu1cx1ozmghXXCgzwHF8Ln8Tlv8
Each year, over billions of dollars in illicit funds – the fruits of crime, corruption or tax evasion – pass through anonymous shell companies. Their owners remain hidden, escaping accountability and passing the costs of their illicit activities onto communities.
How can beneficial ownership data help solve these problems? Why should it be available as open data? And what are the lessons learned from the UK’s first ever open data register of beneficial ownership?
In this lecture, Zosia Sztykowski from OpenOwnership will answer the questions and give a sneak peak of the OpenOwnership Register – a platform for global beneficial ownership information being developed by OpenCorporates, Global Witness, Open Contracting Partnership, The B Team, The Web Foundation and Transparency International.
About the speaker Zosia Sztykowski is the Project Coordinator for OpenOwnership, a new project to build a open register of global beneficial ownership in the public interest. With a background in cultural analysis and feminist organising, Zosia is dedicated to effecting policy and shifting norms in the interest of a more equal, more open society. Zosia recently graduated with an MSc in cultural sociology from the London School of Economics, where she earned the Hobhouse Memorial Prize for her dissertation research.
The shape, architecture and deployment of data are subject to much debate. Digital technology has helped us to optimise the utility of data sources for future applications.
That said, the digital revolution has also led to the destruction of many paper records and datasets in obsolete formats. In many cases, corporate knowledge, along with its underpinning data, has actually declined over the past two decades.
In this lecture, Michael Weatherburn will share his insights into the scale of this issue, and discuss how we can recover important data to fill gaps in knowledge.
About the speaker Michael Weatherburn is Deputy Field Leader at Imperial College where he completed his PhD on the long-term development of the consultancy sector. In 2017 he founded Project Hindsight, a consultancy that works with clients to unlock and optimise high-value corporate knowledge.
Watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I18oS3vKqm0
Easy and convenient access to financial services is becoming more important as more of us expect to be able to bank with our smartphones.
How are traditional banks reacting to consumer trends towards financial technology (FinTech), why it is important for FinTech providers to rely on traditional banks, and what role can big data play?
Various tools and solutions are emerging to help banks and other financial institutions join the growing trend towards FinTech, to support their existing customers better and make their operations more efficient. In this lecture, Anna Krause will explain some solutions, the FinBot platform in particular, and why open source remains a priority for widespread transparency.
About the speaker Anna Krause works on the FinBot platform and on the peer-2-peer app Paylet. She was previously a part of the Future Entrepreneurs of Denmark, where she developed FinTech solutions. Anna specialises in payment systems, behavioural research in millennials, bots and blockchain solutions. Finbot is an ODI Member.
Watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYB0mrwimZM
Interpreting the law requires years of study. In any case you need to carefully and objectively analyse the facts and judge them based on legal precedent and principles of justice.
Open data and digital technologies are arguably bringing about an unprecedented change in how we engage with the law, since more firms are adopting machine learning to help with due diligence, compliance and contract review. As legal aid budgets get smaller, is the legal sector ready for online dispute resolution to democratise access to legal information?
In this lecture, Callum Murray sets out what he foresees as the future of machine learning in the legal sector and the open legal data infrastructure that underpins it.
About the speaker Callum Murray is CEO of graduated ODI Startup Amiqus, which uses machine learning and open data to build tools that make civil justice available to everyone. Callum is also an RSE Enterprise Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he focuses on commercialising machine learning and the intelligent analysis of legal data.
Watch a video of the performance here https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=9XGWx2N7AKM&video_referrer=watch
It’s that time of year again, when team ODI welcome special guests for a festive Friday lunchtime lecture.
This year, sound artists David Littler and Alex McLean will describe and demonstrate their musical collaboration, fusing new and old technologies; namely the algorithmic music through live coding, and mechanical music through music boxes fed by punched paper strips.
The lecture begins with a performance by David Littler, followed by a performance by Alex McLean before they come together for a joint improvisation.
Alex and David are part of the Thinking Out Loud exhibition currently on show at the ODI until March 2017, including using music box compositions created by ODI visitors and residents.
Watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6vUe-ACaZ8&list=PL6DDzoHu1cx1ozmghXXCgzwHF8Ln8Tlv8
The ODI Labs team work hard to evolve and create state-of-the-art technology tools, standards and techniques to help people work better with open data. But who are they? What excites them? What weird and wonderful things to they get up to in their free time?
During this geek fest of all geek fests, ODI Head of Robots Sam Pikesley will bring us lessons from a side-project involving a shed, a solar panel, a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and a, in his own words, “massively over-engineered solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist”, and ODI Web Developer Stuart Harrison will show us how he’s created a ‘quantified son’, among other things.
About Sam and Stuart Sam Pikesley has over 10 years’ experience as a Linux SysAdmin, and was doing DevOps before he even knew DevOps was a thing. Before becoming Head of Robots at the ODI, he worked for a number of startups including, most recently, Amee, where he helped open up a substantial chunk of environmental data.
Stuart Harrison’s background is in local government and the public sector, training first as a journalist, and then working at Lichfield District Council as web developer. During his time at Lichfield, Stuart says he was “a leading light in the world of of open data, starting one of the first local authority data catalogues and building Ratemyplace, one of the first websites to publish local authority food safety inspections, and the first to offer an open API”.
A ‘register’ is an authoritative list of data you can trust. Government keeping and maintaining open registers can help us move beyond relying upon data which is published periodically to operating on data that is trustworthy, standardised and open. Used widely, registers will help the UK to build better services, more cheaply and quickly.
In this talk, Paul Downey from the Government Digital Service will share his vision for what open registers can help achieve, and the characteristics an open register needs in order to appear on the new register.gov.uk domain. To demonstrate this, Paul will take a list of government data through the Register Design Authority process.
About Paul Downey
Paul works for the Government Digital Service (GDS), a part of the Cabinet Office whose job is the digital transformation of government. At GDS, Paul leads the Register Design Authority – a small team focused on building a service to help quickly establish open registers across government.
Is it possible there aren’t enough cats on the web? In this lecture, ODI’s Peter Wells explains how a bout of lunchtime whimsy led him to create an open data register of UK government cats. He talks about the tools he used to create the register and dashboard, how people can help collaboratively maintain them on the web and some of the lessons he learnt along the way. He also admits that it wasn’t all about cats and talks about how anyone can help strengthen data infrastructure.
About Peter Wells Peter Wells is a open data policy expert and consultant at the ODI.
Watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl95fGey7SM
PopChange is developing a new method to perform small area comparisons on Great British Census data from 1971 to 2011. This gives us unprecedented access to explore changes, divisions and inequalities across the UK with data ranging from ethnicity to tenure to Townsend deprivation score.
In this lunchtime lecture Dr Nick Bearman will explain how his team took the disparate Census geographies of enumeration districts and output areas and transformed them into a 1km grid across Great Britain. Nick discusses how and why they implemented the project with a range of open methodologies, open source languages and resources, and licensing our outputs with open data and source code licenses.
About Dr Nick Bearman Nick is Senior GIS Analyst and Course Director at Clear Mapping Co, an award winning international cartographic design and GIS training consultancy. We create beautiful maps to improve efficiency in the workplace with an inclusive and sustainable design focus. He is also an Honorary Lecturer at University of Liverpool and a Chartered Geographer and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plMJR4I0uyk
When data points are linked to one another, the whole generates more intelligence than the sum of its parts. From the social graph to the knowledge graph, the interest graph to the transactions graph, proprietary data networks drive the generation of new power and capital.
Such graphs are used to make algorithmic predictions and optimisations about our future activities. Only those who can aggregate and hedge raw data emerge as the new power players. This situation creates a new imbalance of power, which can be understood with the concept of data asymmetry.
In fact, mapping and analysing data networks provide immense opportunities to civil society. In this talk, Burak Arıkan will present the Graph Commons platform and how individuals and small organisations use it to transform their data into interactive maps and untangle complex relations that impact them and their communities.
About Burak Arikan Burak Arikan is a New York and Istanbul-based artist working with complex networks. He takes the obvious social, economical and political issues as input and runs through an abstract machinery, which generates network maps and algorithmic interfaces, results in performances and procreates predictions to render inherent power relationships visible and discussable. Arikan’s software, prints, installations, and performances have been featured in numerous exhibitions internationally. Arikan is the founder of Graph Commons, a collaborative platform for network mapping, analysis and publishing.
watch the lunchtime lectures https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6DDzoHu1cx1ozmghXXCgzwHF8Ln8Tlv8
This lunchtime lecture will provide an overview of how the local authorities in Greater Manchester have used open data to map the city region’s infrastructure and to provide a city-wide tool to understand social and infrastructure needs to support growth and development.
The session will cover how an idea for an online interactive map developed from ‘Just a map’ to an integral part of city planning in Greater Manchester. MappingGM has been developed over the last two years in-house by Greater Manchester and Salford City Council staff and has changed the way public sector staff use open geospatial data. MappingGM is also widely used by the development (physical as opposed web) industry and is continually being iterated by the small (2.5 people) MappingGM team.
About Lucy Woodbine Lucy Woodbine leads the team that developed MappingGM, she is the Principal Researcher for Planning and Research for New Economy, Greater Manchester’s strategy and research arm. Lucy has worked for New Economy for two and half years; prior to this she worked for a number of national housing providers.
Watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3nAZCD_fj8
The principles of responsible data are that data and technology can play an important part in effective social change work, but they must be used with care. People’s rights to consent, privacy, security and ownership are important to keep in mind while collecting, analysing, storing, presenting and reusing data.
With that in mind, why is responsible data important for the open data movement? How can the principles and practice of responsible data be incorporated into open data initiatives?
Alix Dunn will talk about the foundations of the responsible data community, where it is headed and how responsible data tactics can inform considerations about what data is made available. She will take a look at how those decisions are made, and how intermediary organisations can help by building responsible data into their strategies. Alix will also look at different sectors that are struggling to understand the potential unintended harm that opening some data can have.
About Alix Dunn Alix is the Executive Director and co-founder of The Engine Room, an international organisation that helps social change initiatives and other change agents make the most of data and technology to increase their impact. She is a recovering researcher with a passion for applying creative solutions to difficult problems. She works on identifying data and technology techniques and strategies that can empower social change initiatives around the world to maximise their impact and make the most of their resources. She sits on the board of HURIDOCS, the Technology Advisory Council of Amnesty International, and the Advisory Council of the Open Technology Fund.
ODI Writer / Editor Anna Scott speaks with Andy Hamflett and Simon Raper about how open data can help reduce food poverty.
Andy and Simon have worked together to create the UK’s first dynamic visualisation tool for food poverty, by aligning the Trussell Trust Foodbank Network’s client and food bank location data with a range of open datasets.
Find out more at http://theodi.org/blog/odi-podcast-fighting-hunger-with-data
The ‘Indices of Deprivation’ are used by central government, local government, charities and businesses to target a phenomenal amount of public spending each year. They are a valuable resource in ensuring services and funds are targeted towards the most vulnerable in society.
Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) are the team behind the Indices of Deprivation 2015, a highly trusted, robust and accessible set of data that is used extensively.
During this lunchtime lecture, you’ll hear the highs and lows of working with administrative data, and what it took to create the most downloaded dataset on data.gov.uk
About the speaker Chief Executive and co-founder at OCSI, Tom Smith is a lifelong data addict with degrees in physics, artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience. Tom supports public sector organisations to use information effectively for policy and decision making, thus using better data for better decisions.
He is Chair of the Environment Agency Data Advisory Group, and was project lead on UK government Indices of Deprivation.
The EveryPolitician project’s goal is ambitious: to collect, collate and share data on every politician in the world.
Up until now, mySociety – the brains behind the project – have focused on national legislatures, but the team is now actively expanding the depth and width of the data (what is stored, and on whom).
Hear about the joy and pain of working with politician’s data in this lively lunchtime lecture, in which Dave Whiteland will explain exactly what mySociety are doing, how they’re doing it and why.
About the speaker
Dave Whiteland joined mySociety as a developer over six years ago, and has cut code on a wide variety of projects including FixMyStreet and PledgeBank. Dave has spent much time encouraging local partners in countries as diverse as Uruguay, Uganda and Malaysia to set up and run projects based on mySociety’s platforms. Now he’s an active member of the EveryPolitician team, helping out with data, outreach and bot-wrangling.
More data is being produced than ever before, and more and more of it is becoming openly available. Open data has great potential to help drive poverty eradication and improve global development outcomes. Data usage, however, remains relatively low. In the UK, for instance, a third of the datasets found on the government’s online portal have never been used.
One reason for this is because it is hard to join-up data relating to funding, people and outcomes since it is published in different formats, and to different standards. This means that potential users of the data can’t easily see how various bits of data relate to each other.
The Joined-Up Data Standards project has been exploring how data standards can be joined-up, using linked data and semantic mapping. While it is technically possible to join-up data standards in this way, political will and cooperation are key to making it happen.
In this lecture, Tom Orrell will explain the work of the Joined-Up Data Standards project and outline political solutions at the international level for more interoperability between data standards, with the ultimate aim of improving decision-making and accountability.
About the speaker
Tom Orrell is Publish What You Fund’s Senior Advocacy Advisor for the Joined-Up Data Standards project, run jointly by Publish What You Fund and Development Initiatives. Tom’s role is to highlight the value that joining up data standards can deliver for standard setters, data producers and users alike. Tom’s experience lies in the development and humanitarian, digital and data policy, and human rights sectors. He has previously worked as a consultant for UNICEF in Ethiopia and Togo, as a programme manager at Global Partners Digital, as a public law caseworker, and as a consultant for the Overseas Development Institute, Article 19, and others. Tom was Called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2011 and holds a BA in International Relations from Keele University.
Find out more about the ODI Friday Lunchtime Lecture series http://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures
Why can’t construction be as smart as other industries, like aerospace, renewable energies or IT?
Will construction ever evolve, making the most of the opportunity offered by data science and IoT? Or will the sector be disrupted by a giant smart city data monopolist that manages to crack construction site robotics? Will construction workforces be able to re-skill and re-train, or will a generic, self-optimising, embodied AI replace all engineers, surveyors, site managers and eventually architects and designers?
In this lecture, Antonio Pisano will shed some light on the future of construction in a data-driven future.
Antonio Pisano is a designer, public speaker and writer. Co-founder of Marcel Mauer Architecture and Smart City strategist at CAIRE Consortium, he has curated events and campaigned with major UK Construction Industry Institutions such as BIS, Constructing Excellence, G4C, RIBA, RICS, CIC, BRE and the ODI, to raise awareness on sustainability, innovation and open data.
What the video stream of the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skemHZcKARo
Find out about future Friday Lunchtime Lectures here https://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures
Friday lunchtime lectures are for everyone and are free to attend. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk.
You can watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRA-SRLawoc
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a range of global objectives to improve the state of the world by 2030, from ending poverty to improving global health, tackling climate change to promoting sustainable economic growth
Spearheaded by the UN, the SDGs offer specific targets and indicators for all organisations working to promote global development – from governments to charities, researchers to community groups – to work towards in order to help reach the goals by 2030.
Data will be crucial to achieving and measuring progress towards the SDGs. In this lunchtime lecture we will hear from three open data leaders working to achieve SDGs in different contexts. In particular, their work supports Goal 17 and its sub-target to increase the availability of high-quality data in national contexts, and part of Goal 16, to provide access to justice for all.
Linet Kwamboka Nyang’au As coordinator of Kenya’s Open Data Initiative, will reflect on experience she’s gained creating policies and partnerships to encourage government institutions to open their data, ensure government transparency and involve citizens in decision making.
Sandra Elena As coordinator of the Open Justice Programme at Argentina’s Ministry of Justice, Sandra will share insights into what it takes to convene over 50 judicial institutions around a standardised regulatory framework for producing and publishing data, as well as engaging civil society and promoting new technologies as part of the Justice 2020 programme.
Neil Hoorn As Open Data Project Manager in the municipal government of Cape Town, Neil has has been instrumental in the rapid development of the City of Cape Town’s Open Data Project. Neil will talk about how he managed the process, along with how he aligns open data policy and programmes with smart city goals.
The panel will be at ODIHQ as part of the Open Data Leaders Network.
The panel will be chaired by ODI Writer/Editor Anna Scott.
Friday lunchtime lectures are for everyone and are free to attend. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk.
Code is all about pattern. Beyond computer programming, this means code can also be well-suited to creating musical patterns – not only in recordings, but also during live performances.
In this lecture, algorage pioneer and ODI Sound Artist in Residence Alex McLean will talk about live coding of music and how it’s development over the past 16 years. He will relate this history to the open data movement, describing how live coders have opened up and shared the underlying structures of their music as free or open source software. Alex will wrap up with some thoughts and predictions around where he thinks live coding is going, both in terms of creative practice and its wider cultural influences.
Alex McLean is a live coding musician and software artist based in Sheffield UK. He’s been making people dance to code since 2001 through a range of musical collaborations, including with Slub, Canute, xynaaxmue and aalleexx. He releases his “polyrhythmic and hyperreal strand of techno” (bleep.com) on Sheffield label Computer Club, in particular Peak Cut EP (2015) and his forthcoming album Spicule. Alex co-founded the Algorave and TOPLAP live coding movements, and the AlgoMech festival of algorithmic and mechanical movement, the first edition of which takes place 12-20 November 2016 in Sheffield. Alex works as a generalist as a member of FoAM Kernow. During 2016 he is Sound Artist in Residence at ODI HQ, supported by the Sound and Music national organisation for new music.
In 2012, the same year that CERN discovered the Higgs boson, another experiment was underway that crossed more than just scientific frontiers: Arts@CERN.
Since 2011, when the first Collide residency awards were announced at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, there had not only been engineered collisions between protons at CERN, but also orchestrated collisions between artists and scientists.
So what does a curator add to a highly scientific and technological environment? Why are they necessary to make creative collisions happen and matter? These and many more questions will be answered in this Friday lunchtime lecture by Ariane Koek, founder of Arts@CERN, who initiated, created and designed this extensive multi-stranded international arts programme.
This Friday lunchtime lecture features an impromptu discussion on the potential impact of the EU Referendum result on UK data policy, and open data more widely.
Humans use multiple senses to navigate their surroundings in day-to-day life. But data is largely confined to the realm of the visual; from the ways the systems that collect it are designed and programmed, to the spreadsheets and databases that analyse it, to the visualisations that help us make sense of it.
But is this enough?
‘Data manifestation’ describes how we move data away from the screen and into physical and environmental forms, so we can use different senses to understand its meaning.
Giles Lane will talk about the Lifestreams project – which works to express complex datasets into 3D forms to help people recognise patterns and understand meaning by using spatial and tactile senses – and hint at future possibilities.
About Giles Lane Giles Lane is an artist, designer and the founder of creative studio Proboscis. He has led internationally acclaimed transdisciplinary projects such as Mapping Perception, Urban Tapestries and Navigating History, with a strong focus on research, public engagement and participation.
Proboscis collaborates with research partners including UCL, the London School of Economics, the Institute of Child Health, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and Birkbeck College, and also with industrial companies including Orange, HP Labs, France Telecom R&D, Channel 4 and Ordnance Survey.
ODI Writer / Editor Anna Scott speaks with Martin Vowels about his software company Plexus, which creates digital products to empower workplace wellbeing.
Plexus has developed a knowledge base pooling diverse data from different platforms to help users understand mental health standards and services in their areas, from support networks to legal aid and job opportunities.
Plexus is a mental wellbeing startup that aims to support people in and out of work.
In striving to reflect, review and help empower change in people’s daily lives, Plexus builds on the NHS 5 steps to wellbeing and government reports into digital empowerment in the workplace.
Since winning the ODI Showcase in 2015, the first product that Plexus has produced is ‘Grace’, an AI bot. For five minutes each day, Grace asks users questions about their challenges, confidence, positivity and how useful they have felt the day has been. Users can then explore the data they record in weekly, customised emails and a personalisable online dashboard.
Plexus also uses machine learning to direct users to its knowledge base, which aggregates data sourced from over 25 different government services, NGOs and charities including Mind, Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert and Shelter. Open data sits at the heart of this process, from supporting users learn to helping develop Grace’s ability to understand and predict. A primary goal for Plexus is to produce meaningful open datasets that have the power to shape service provision on a regional and national level.
About Martin Vowles Martin Vowles is Creative Director & co-Founder of M/A and also CEO of Plexus. With a MA in Communication Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, in 2008 Martin co-founded digital design studio M/A, which has created digital and physical design products for Mind, NSPCC, Southbank Centre, Tommy’s, Visit Bankside, Headlong, Sam Mcknight and Kings College.
Martin’s interests include Typography, civic tech, data visualisation and encrypted fabric printing and you can find him on twitter @martininma.
Watch a video of the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkayFmLj9zk
Find out more about ODI events here https://theodi.org/events
The cultural sector is one of the UK’s strongest assets. It encompasses world-leading broadcasters and some of the best museums and art galleries globally; their collections contain objects that are as important as anything in any other collection in the world.
Most institutions are looking hard at how they open up access to these collections, but in an environment where nearly every public sector institution is facing substantial funding challenges are they getting enough support? Richard Leeming talks about the work of the Research and Education Space and suggests that open data could transform the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector.
About Richard Leeming Richard is the external relationship manager at the Research and Education Space, a three-way partnership between the BBC, Jisc and the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC). He is building a Linked Open Data platform which will power better learning experiences and make it easier and more efficient for collection holders to enable access to their precious assets.
Watch a video of the presentation here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pfo_sw_EQ0
find out more about ODI events here http://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures
ODI Writer / Editor Anna Scott speaks with Lucy Crompton-Reid, CEO of Wikimedia UK, about addressing gender bias and promoting women’s participation in Wikipedia and other knowledge platforms
If achieved, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set out by the UN could transform the world by 2030. But how can data help us to achieve these goals?
Rupert Simons, Chief Executive of Publish What You Fund – an organisation that campaigns for aid transparency – will give insight into the state of data in international development, and what improvements need to be made. Rupert will also share the findings of the latest Aid Transparency Index.
About Rupert Simons Rupert joined Publish What You Fund in January 2015. He is responsible for strategy and overall management of the organisation, and reports to the Chair and the Board of Trustees.
He previously worked for the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, where he was a country head. He has worked with Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf to improve the management of her priority projects, helped set up the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency and a Situation Room for Sierra Leone’s National Ebola Response Centre.
Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, Lucy Crompton-Reid talks about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in the context of the gender gap, discussing the impact of this on the production and consumption of open knowledge and what the charity is doing to help eradicate inequalities and bias on one of the leading sources of information in the world.
About Lucy Crompton-Reid Lucy Crompton-Reid joined Wikimedia UK as the new Chief Executive in October 2015, and is working with the staff team, board of trustees and wider Wikimedia community to develop a new strategy and business plan for the charity and to help shape the work of the programmes team. She will also be driving forward the organisation’s advocacy, communications and fundraising activities, and engaging new strategic partners.
Lucy has worked in the cultural, voluntary and public sectors for nearly two decades, with past experience including senior roles at Arts Council England, British Refugee Council and the House of Lords. Most recently, she was Chief Executive of the national literature charity Apples and Snakes, England’s leading organisation for performance poetry and spoken word. Throughout her career, Lucy has had a particular focus on widening participation, and brings a strong commitment to learning, public engagement and diversity in her role at Wikimedia UK.
Watch Lucy's lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uooBImYrjk
Find out more about the ODI's Friday Lunchtime Lectures here: https://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures
Is it time to move beyond shop window displays in open data portals and embrace data market places? What does a good data market place look like?
Making data more discoverable, accessible and usable is a goal shared by government, businesses, sectors and non profits. How do we realise maximum value of the web of data? What kind of data infrastructure do we need for the discovery, collaboration on and exchanges of data?
Join us for a thought debate about how we access, use and share data across organisations to maximise the value of the web of data. Speakers include Eddie Copeland, Director of Strategy at Nesta; Leigh Dodds, Chair of Bath: Hacked and ODI Associate; and Yodit Stanton, founder of Open Sensors.
Watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDFFBPbSoFc
or sign up for the next ODI Friday Lecture here https://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures/friday-lunchtime-lecture-editing-out-the-gender-gap
The UK has led the way in publishing vast quantities of open data, but what’s stopping us from making better use of it? The biggest issue we now face is raising quality, not quantity. In this talk we’ll discuss what makes a good, quality dataset, and we’ll use automated data visualisation to illustrate their power and beauty.
John Griffin is the founder of Atchai, a consultancy specialising in data-driven applications and developers of the interactive data visualisation platform, Dataseed.
Follow the presentation via Scribd https://www.scribd.com/doc/310078987/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-The-beauty-of-quality-data or watch the video https://youtu.be/8iFomhTYgbE
Friday lunchtime lectures are for everyone and are free to attend. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk. Reserve your free ticket here: http://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures
In the first ODI Podcast, ODI Editor Anna Scott speaks with Malick Tapsoba from the Burkina Faso Open Data Initiative on transparency, how his team used open data to support democracy and lessons for other governments aspiring for open elections
What do the KLF, Alan Moore and Edmund Blackadder have to do with web design?
Find out from Paul Rissen, Senior Data Architect at the BBC, with a deep dive into the structure of narrative and how data could unlock a new approach to creative expression. We’ll cover the BBC’s experiments in structured data for storytelling in drama and news, why we need the Internet of Fictional Things, and the alchemic secrets of the Web’s pioneers.
Paul Rissen is a Project Manager of the RES project at the BBC, currently helping open the data held by the UK’s cultural institutions for use in education, via the RES Project (http://res.space). He pioneered the ‘storyline’ architecture that creates structured data from traditional narratives, allowing audiences and machines alike to explore networks of narrative using RESTful Web architecture. He developed this first in fictional environments – continuing dramas at the BBC including Doctor Who and Eastenders – and adapted it to news, where it has been the basis for new approaches to the presentation of news through the BBC’s website.
This is a recording of the ODI Friday lunchtime lecture given on 15th April.
The Institute for Government’s Whitehall Monitor aims to chart government – literally. It analyses and visualises numbers from and about government – on everything from staff numbers to public perceptions – to help politicians, civil servants, civil society and the public better understand what central government looks like in the UK. The Whitehall Monitor 2015 annual report looks at what happened under the coalition government from 2010 to 2015. Gavin Freeguard, one of the authors, talks us through some of the highlights.
Gavin Freeguard is a senior researcher at the Institute for Government. His work has focused on leading Whitehall Monitor and also involved transparency in government contracting and preparing politicians for government. He was previously political adviser on culture, media and sport to Harriet Harman MP and, before that, deputy director of the Orwell Prize and senior editor at the Media Standards Trust. He is a trustee of the Orwell Youth Prize, a member of the Young Policy Professionals core group, and edits a daily email on data visualisation, Warning: Graphic Content.
Paul Maltby, Director of Data at the Government Digital Service, outlines the new programme of work to improve the availability, quality and use of government data.
As Director of Data, Paul leads teams in the Government Digital Service in the Cabinet Office responsible for making better use of data, data infrastructure and data policy and governance, supporting a cross-Government Data Programme. Paul was formerly Director of Open Data and Government Innovation leading both data-focussed teams such as Data Sharing, Data Science, Open Data and Transparency and policy innovation teams such as Analysis and Insight and the design-led Policy Lab.
Prior to this, Paul was Director of Open Data and Transparency in the Cabinet Office, which worked to release government data that can be freely accessed by citizens and businesses to help drive the next generation of data-led economic growth, strengthen government accountability and improve public services.
At North Pole Incorporated, a data revolution is underway to modernise how Christmas gifts get to girls and boys around the world.
For hundreds of years, North Pole Inc. and its global network of elvish subsidiaries have been gathering data on what children across the world want for Christmas, who has been naughty or nice and the latest toy trends.
To meet children’s needs, North Pole Inc. relies on up-to-date information spanning delivery routes (by air, boat and donkey), building entrances and exits, fireplace hazards, stocking sizes, reindeer health, movement and feed. The problem is, the global population is expanding and companies like North Pole Inc. everywhere are being forced to find new, more efficient ways of delivering services.
This year, a crack team at North Pole Inc. has been working on developing and implementing the data infrastructure that Christmas needs, to keep children happy for years to come.
“Open data” and “big data” are the current buzzwords, but does the public know what these terms really mean, or are they the preserve of nerds, developers and policy wonks? Jonathan Stoneman has spent the last six months analysing the impact of open data on journalism, and has written a working paper for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Even he was surprised by some of his findings.
Jonathan is an Associate Trainer at the ODI. He was a journalist and editor as well as Head of Training at BBC World Service until 2010. As a freelance trainer and consultant he specialises in data journalism with open data. Jonathan is a contributor to the book “Data journalism: Mapping the Future”, which is being published on 4 November.
In this talk the Open Banking Working Group team discuss their work to improve bank services for consumers, businesses and society by making better use of data from across the spectrum.
They have been tasked with delivering a framework for an open API standard in UK banking by the end of the year. This will highlight how customers can have more control over their data, and how to create an environment that supports creating value from its usage. The team want to hear views from the audience so come armed with questions and ideas!
About our Friday lunchtime lectures With a broad range of topics in open data such as tracking government expenditure, British landscape mapping and creating art, there’s bound to be something that interests you.
The sessions run from 1pm to 1.45pm weekly during UK school term-times, with informal networking until 2pm. Each lecture lasts for around 20 minutes, leaving time for questions afterwards. The lectures don’t require any specialist knowledge, but are focused around communicating the meaning and impact of open data in all areas of life.
Each week the lectures are streamed live on YouTube and then uploaded to our YouTube and Vimeo channels. You can also download the Friday lunchtime lectures as a podcast on iTunes.
You can follow the lectures and contribute to the discussion using #ODIFridays on Twitter.
In February 2015 the UK government launched Contracts Finder, a portal that advertises open government-spending contract opportunities, allowing companies to easily and quickly bid for them. The UK spends £250 billion every year on public spending contracts, including vital public services like the NHS and it’s important that this money is spent as efficiently as possible.
As part of an ASI fellowship, William Jones worked in collaboration with the UK Cabinet Office to increase the number of companies bidding on these contracts. He did this by automatically recommending them contracts which are available and relevant, using publicly accessible information from UK companies. The web application William built is called Contracts Recommender. His talk will explain the public sources of information he uses as well as how Contracts Recommender works.
William Jones was recently awarded the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the Cambridge Computer Laboratory with Distinction. During the ASI fellowship he first worked on a deep learning image classification project with Tractable.io, using the convolutional neural network framework Caffe. Following this he joined a project with the Cabinet Office using natural language processing to automatically recommend relevant government procurement contracts to companies in the UK. He has just started a PhD in Mathematical Genomics at Cambridge.
Are physical and data infrastructures distinct? In this talk, Georgina Voss and Wesley Goatley present and discuss their infrastructure data artwork “Familiars”, which directly intercepted logistical radio signals broadcast by planes, ships, and trains, highlighting the material aspects of data infrastructures.
In unpacking the research and development behind “Familiars”, they explore how access to forms of “open” data is mediated and who this data is really intended for. While the UK government is currently investing in the “best” ways to plan, create, and fund vital infrastructure projects, they argue that engaging with crucial questions around control, ownership and access to data requires an understanding of their physical components and context.
Wesley Goatley is an artist and researcher.
Georgina Voss is a technology anthropologist, writer, and co-founder of research co-operative “Strange Telemetry”.
Landscape Watch Hampshire is a new community project to characterise the county’s landscape in 2005 and 2013 by analysing aerial photos, held as open data by Hampshire County Council, and thereby identify the changes that have taken place over a period of eight years; the output from the project will be made available as open data via the Hampshire Hub as it becomes available.
Hampshire County Council, on behalf of the Hampshire Hub Partnership, is collaborating with Remote Sensing Applications Consultants Ltd (RSAC) and the University of Portsmouth (UoP) on the Crowdsourcing Landscape Change project, co-funded by Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board).
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Both the Freedom of Information (FOI) and open data schemes are well established but they don’t always work together to achieve a common aim of making information more accessible.
Matt Burgess will examine how FOI and open data can be combined to enhance the UK’s openness. Drawing on real-world examples, he will suggest how those promoting transparency can identify ways of encouraging more important information to be published.
Matt Burgess is a journalist and author, who has a special interest in the Freedom of Information Act. He has written the book, Freedom of Information: A Practical Guide for Journalists, and runs the FOI Directory website.
2013 was a big year for open data. G8 leaders signed the Open Data Charter and the UK Government made a series 21 commitments in a National Action Plan for open government. It pledged to release more local open data, manage digital records better and develop a new anti-corruption strategy, among other initiatives to help it transition to ‘open by default’.
How far have they been met, two years on? Politics expert Ben Worthy will reflect on findings from his new independent report on the action plan, followed by comments from Involve and the Cabinet Office.
Ben Worthy is a lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College, University of London where he teaches Contemporary British Politics and Digital Politics. He has written extensively on issues around transparency, freedom of information and open data, looking particularly at the impact of the UK Government’s Transparency Agenda.
There’s lots of open data on local areas about, but it’s in hundreds of datasets in hundreds of places and hundreds of formats. So where should you begin?
The Local Government Association (LGA) has developed LG Inform, an online data service to bring lots of this data together. Working with Porism, they have developed an API for developers and others to present the data in a variety of ways for wide audiences.
Juliet Whitworth, research and information manager at the LGA, and Mike Thacker, founder of Porism, will take you through what’s possible, give a demo and answer your questions.
You can also watch this talk and view the slides on the ODI website: http://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures/whats-apining-in-your-local-area-revealing-places-with-open-data
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As the growth in Open Data published by government continues to accelerate, the need to underpin this with high quality and maintained geospatial data has never been greater. In Great Britain, open geospatial data has been ubiquitously available from Ordnance Survey, the National Mapping Agency since 2010. For this talk a range of case studies will be presented that demonstrate the application of this open data in support of successful initiatives that deliver economic growth, increased public sector transparency and citizen inspired social good.
David Henderson is the Head of Data Products at Ordnance Survey. He has worked across most of Ordnance Survey’s commercial and government customer groups before leading the management and future development of Ordnance Survey’s geospatial content and data products - including OS’s Open Data product portfolio. David is also the Chair of the Association of Geographic Information (AGI) and a regular speaker at industry events.
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In May 2014 the Environment Agency publicly committed to becoming an Open Data organisation. This talk describes the journey that the organisation has been on so far and will look to where this journey may lead.
Michael Rose has worked with Government data for over 15 years.
Michael was part of the team that implemented intellectual property management into the Environment Agency and have been involved in many complex data licensing negotiations to enable wide sharing of our data and have been utilising this experience to help deliver our transition to an Open Data organisation.
Ubiquitous Commons is a philosophical and technological toolkit enabling citizens, institutions, organizations, enterprises, researchers and other stakeholders to become actively engaged in defining how the data and information they produce (through their bodies, expressions, movements, actions, gestures…) are used. A process that aims to ensure that their rights are protected and that ethical initiatives for science, civic action, social organization and coordination become possible.
Democracy Club is a group of volunteers that aims to increase the quantity, quality and accessibility of information on election candidates, politicians and democratic processes through digital tools, microvolunteering and collaboration with like-minded organisations.
Web developer & designer Sym Roe talked about the story behind YourNextMP, who reused the data, as well as the other Democracy Club projects and where they’re heading in the future.
Ben Unsworth, Data Solutions Engineer at Socrata, explained how immersive user experience and machine learning can help governments engage users and drive better understanding from open data.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data The World of Data: bit.ly/worldofdata
What roles do artists play in raising questions about open data and technology?
This lunchtime lecture we heard from ODI Associate Curator in Residence Hannah Redler, who reflected on the ODI’s art programme ‘Data as Culture’. Hannah also shared her insights gained over 20 years spent commissioning and curating artists working with technology in major museum environments.
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The ODI, in partnership with Nesta, is running a series of Open Data Challenges. The Heritage + Culture Open Data Challenge invited people to use open data to create products or services that would engage more and more diverse people with UK heritage and culture.
This lunchtime lecture we meet the three finalists: City Radar, Culture Everywhere and Rabble Days. They each give a short pitch about their products, their development so far, how they are using open data to innovate and what their plans are for the future.
Find out more about the challenge process here: http://www.nesta.org.uk/closed-heritage-culture-open-data-challenge
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The 2015 general election is rapidly approaching. What will the UK Government look like after the 7 May 2015? What are the challenges that lay ahead?
Gavin Freeguard from the Institute for Government uses open data charts from the Whitehall Monitor to pinpoint some of the pressures that could face a new government and discusses how the UK can continue to lead the open data agenda after the election.
Gavin joined the Institute For Government in August 2013 and his work is currently focused on Whitehall Monitor and transparency in government contracts. He was previously political adviser on culture, media and sport to Harriet Harman MP and, before that, deputy director of the Orwell Prize and senior researcher at the Media Standards Trust.
The slides to this talk can be found here - https://www.scribd.com/doc/258880858/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-When-the-dust-settles-open-data-and-the-2015-general-election
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If you don’t know where your personalised data has gone, there’s no way to know whether your wishes are being respected. Mistakes that arise due to secrecy can be catastrophic to public trust in the handling of NHS patients’ data, and in other fields.
How do we begin to understand and resolve these issues? What are the benefits of medical data in research studies and the development of new treatments? How do we open a window onto how our medical data is being used to benefit everyone?
For this lunchtime lecture Sam Smith of medConfidential will walk us through the issues, solutions and benefits surrounding personal medical data.
You can view the slides to this talk here [link to scribd]
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
The ODI released its ‘Open data roadmap for the UK’ in December 2014, with steps the next UK Government can take to continue to make progress on open data. As the General Election draws closer, we’re starting to dig into the details behind the roadmap and open it up for public consultation.
What would a Chief Data Officer for the UK look like? How can we use the National Information Infrastructure to plan for the future?
Listen back on this engaging and fun session exploring the drivers behind the roadmap and some of its key priorities.
Ellen Broad is Policy Lead at the Open Data Institute, where her role is to distill knowledge and expertise from across the ODI’s team and help to influence government policy, advise government and the private sector on how to capitalise on open data, and engage wider communities on issues affecting access to and reuse of data.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
Over the last two years the World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data Barometer has surveyed the open data landscape in over 75 countries, building up a picture of progress, and pitfalls, on the road to ‘open by default’.
The latest edition of the Barometer, launched in January 2015, shows a growing data divide. But it also points to areas where open data is having impact, and highlights factors that appear to contribute to greater political, economic and social outcomes from open data initiatives.
Listen to the track to hear about the Barometer findings, dig deeper into the methodology, hear about how you can re-mix the data (all the underlying data is open data of course), and discuss the future of open data metrics and measurement.
Speakers
Tim Davies is a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, and Affiliate at the Harvard Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. He was previously open data research coordinator at the World Wide Web Foundation, leading the development of the Open Data in Developing Countries project, and working on the research and write-up of the Open Data Barometer. He tweets as @timdavies.
Dr Savita Bailur is open data research lead at the World Wide Web Foundation, working on the development of a new programme of open data action research in Africa and Asia, designed to discover context-appropriate ways of closing the data divide. You can reach her on Twitter @SavitaBailur.
The Slides to this talk can be found on the link below
https://www.scribd.com/doc/256380649/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Exploring-the-Open-Data-Barometer-the-challenges-ahead-for-an-open-data-revolution
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
Open Data portals, smart city initiatives, data marketplaces, M2M (machine to machine), real-time monitoring… all important structures, but what are their real world implications? What are their tangible benefits?
For this Friday lunchtime lecture, we explore actual use cases of open data to create innovative new services.
Marie-Cécile Huet is Chief Marketing Officer of OpenDataSoft, a software company developing a Cloud-based turnkey platform for data publishing, sharing and reuse. Twitter: @mchuet / @opendatasoft.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
For our 6 February lecture… How can open data help you choose your job?
Choosing a career path isn’t easy. With so many paths to take, it can be difficult to know which would suit us best.
Open data can help. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills has developed ‘LMI for All’, an open data portal to support careers guidance. The portal brings together labour market information (LMI) via an API for developers to present in a variety of ways for wide audiences.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
For our 30 January lecture… BBC Things - joining up the news with open data
Online news organisations are exploring how to describe and connect the content of their stories using tags. The BBC recently opened its tagging data up to the public, with the launch of BBC Things.
What benefits does this bring to journalism? Could we use open data to join up a story being told across the web? Join James Logan, Product Owner of the BBC Linked Data Platform, discussed these questions and more at this Friday lunchtime lecture.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
Open data holds the potential to open up the energy market in the UK. Small, renewable generators produce almost 15% of the UK’s electricity, but they often lack the industry knowledge to get the best rates in selling their power onto the grid. Open Utility is a company that uses open data to help people buy and sell renewable energy. James Johnston explained their plans to create a peer-to-peer energy marketplace.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: www.theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love
One thing we won’t be short of in the future is data – we’ll have detailed analytics about how we live and the world around us. But what about the past? Is it possible to pull together data about the history of our cities and gain some insight into the past?
In this lecture, Leigh Dodds introduced a project from Bath: Hacked, that is using historical maps and cultural heritage open data to let people begin exploring 400 years of Bath’s history.
Leigh Dodds is an associate with the Open Data Institute and the manager of Bath: Hacked’s data store.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love
James Smith, developer at the ODI, is standing for parliament in the 2016 UK general election, and is using open data to do it.
In this lecture, he explained how the data that’s out there can provide interesting insights for election campaign planning, and how he’s also planning to publish as much open data as possible on campaign financing.
James is passionate about using web technology and Open Data to make a better future for everyone, with a particular interest in the environmental and social benefits that can be created.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/odi_tweets Our website: www.theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data
Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love
GOV.UK performance is a new approach to improving government services, using data. We show the metrics that matter to the civil servants who provide government services.
All the dashboards are public – no usernames or passwords – so the government is accountable for the services it provides. We’re making the map of the UK’s public services and how they connect together. And we’re building this map around the user needs of citizens and businesses.
Listen in as we look at how we’re using data to help government meet the needs of citizens and businesses.
Henry Hadlow is a designer interested in digital services and beautiful typography. He works at GOV.UK. When he’s not designing he likes to play the accordion.
Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/odi_tweets Our website: www.theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video
Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love
If you thought 3D printing was some sort of futuristic sci-fi technology that would never catch on, think again. I can make is a group that produces kits to help teachers, parents and children understand all about 3D printing. Chris Thorpe, I can make’s technology spoke about how the group hopes to help inspire the current school generation to become the engineers, inventors and manufacturers of the future.
Chris is a technologist who makes things with code, APIs and now 3D printing. He was once the CTO of Moshi Monsters, the pet monster game that makes parents’ evenings awkward.
Our videos: https://vimeo.com/theodiuk Our audio: https://soundcloud.com/theodi Our slides: https://www.scribd.com/OpenDataInstitute Our photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukodi/ Our website: theodi.org
Data from the High Speed 2 project has been released under an Open Government Licence. This has provided companies like Landmark an opportunity to enter the world of “Open”.
Jez Nicholson told us about the product that Landmark has built upon the HS2 data and how “Open” may have ultimately changed the business itself.
By day, Jez Nicholson is Head of Product Development for a leading property risk assessment company. By night, he is lead developer of OpenPlaques.org.
With kind thanks to Thomson Reuters for supporting and hosting this event.
Our videos: https://vimeo.com/theodiuk Our audio: https://soundcloud.com/theodi Our slides: https://www.scribd.com/OpenDataInstitute Our photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukodi/ Our website: theodi.org
You don’t have to look far to find pictures and infographics that visualise data to make us understand it better. But musical representations of data are harder to come by.
Developer-musicians Nicholas Tollervey and Simon Davy have taken footfall data provided by the Leeds Data Mill and turned it into music for brass band (yes, you read that right).
Their lunchtime lecture was a loud, fun and thought-provoking exposition of open data manipulated via the programming language Python into a meaningful musical medium.
Nicholas is a programmer, classically trained musician, philosophy graduate, teacher and writer. Simon is a percussionist with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He currently works in Leeds as a computer scientist.
Our videos: https://vimeo.com/theodiuk Our audio: https://soundcloud.com/theodi Our slides: https://www.scribd.com/OpenDataInstitute Our photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukodi/ Our website: theodi.org
Everyday our cities generate increasingly vast amounts of data. What happens when this data from across public, private and the third sector becomes open? Mark Barrett argues that focussing our use of local data so that it is “for the city, by the city” is the path towards unlocking the most value from open data.
Mark Barrett is an open data lead for Leeds, and created Leeds Data Mill – the open data platform for the city – surfacing public, private and 3rd sector information. He also co-founded and co-run Leeds Data Thing – a group set up to explore the benefits of open data across industries within the city.
Governments hold a lot of data. A huge amount of data. And many are beginning to open it up for citizens and businesses to monitor and improve all sorts of things – from education and public services to crime rates and traffic. But all this data has to be stored, managed and presented in ways people can understand.
CKAN is a data management platform used by governments and organisations around the world to handle these important functions. Irina Bolychevsky delivered a live demonstration of its data management workflows, visualisation and discovery features that help make data easy to upload, access and re-use.
Irina Bolychevsky is the Commercial Director of Open Knowledge and the former CKAN Product Owner
The Great British Public Toilet Map is an on-going project to map the UK’s public toilets using open data. It began in 2010 when only one council was publishing toilet data and is soon to relaunch with a database of over 5000 facilities. Gail Ramster describes an outsider’s pursuit of local council open data and the obstacles encountered, including Ordnance Survey licensing, FOI legislation and the need for a standard format.
Ramster is a Research Associate at Royal College of Art working on people-centred design research.
People tend to think of ‘public goods’ as things like suburban roads that must be built by governments because if governments don’t provide them, then no-one will. But this is an impoverished definition of public goods. In fact, private and public goods operate in an ecology, each reinforcing the other, and they do so in every social organisation we have – within families, suburban football clubs, firms.
We will explore these ideas and then focus on open data as the new emergent public good of our time.
Nicholas Gruen is a prominent Australian economist and commentator on Web 2.0 and the CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of Peach Financial, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Online Opinion.
People tend to think of ‘public goods’ as things like suburban roads that must be built by governments because if governments don’t provide them, then no-one will. But this is an impoverished definition of public goods. In fact, private and public goods operate in an ecology, each reinforcing the other, and they do so in every social organisation we have – within families, suburban football clubs, firms.
We will explore these ideas and then focus on open data as the new emergent public good of our time.
Nicholas Gruen is a prominent Australian economist and commentator on Web 2.0 and the CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of Peach Financial, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Online Opinion.
As the open data movement gains momentum, it becomes clear that there are substantial business opportunities to be seized through the use and publication of data. However, using open data can often present new risks which need to be managed. Drawing on some preliminary findings from an ongoing study of SMEs, corporate and public sector organisations, Tom Wainwright seek to provide insight into these issues.
Dr Thomas Wainwright is a researcher based in the University of Southampton’s Centre for Innovation and Enterprise.
Open data has the potential to power tools that provide solutions to real problems. Although the UK is the world leader in releasing open data, its use in informing real world solutions has been limited and fragmented, with innovative startups sometimes lacking support and data expertise to scale to a sustainable business level.
Hear from the final winners of the first three Open Data Challenges - individuals who have developed a solution to a specific social issue and been supported through their journey by the Open Data Challenge Series to win £40,000. Topics covered will range from helping parents engage with their child’s learning to enabling community energy groups to engage with energy efficiency interventions.
New, cheaper sensor and tracking hardware, and new big data and data science techniques, mean that we can now gather and use huge amounts of real-time data to understand the built environment better.
Francine Bennett of Mastodon C talks about the technical challenges, applications, and potential future value of collecting and using data in buildings.
Francine is CEO and Co-founder of big data specialists Mastodon C. They offer an open source technology platform and the skills to help users realise its potential, and do so on zero carbon infrastructure.
Slides from this lecture can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/232455173/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-The-secret-lives-of-buildings-revealed-with-open-data
The web has transformed our lives so much over the last twenty years that we think of it as an inevitable development and a permanent part of our world. In this talk, Professor Carr explains how the open web we know is just one of many attempts over the last century to build a planet-wide network of information. Why was this one successful? And will it continue to be so?
Professor Leslie Carr is a Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton where he researches the impact of network technologies on our lives and economy, and in particular on the research and knowledge industries.
Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/230569908/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Open-data-open-web-Just-a-passing-fad-with-Professor-Leslie-Carr
Ben Unsworth explains why data is our next opportunity in the evolution towards a democracy that is less ideological, and more entrepreneurial, collaborative, interactive, and performance-driven – a Public Sector that is about results and better outcomes for citizens.
Slides from this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/229833691/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-How-can-local-government-deliver-better-services-with-fewer-resources-using-data
The care.data programme in the NHS came off the rails, despite – or possibly because – officials tried presenting it as an ‘open data’ initiative. It isn’t. But this conflation of ‘data sharing’ with open data is far from unique; from the National Pupil Database to your tax records and Cabinet Office’s resurrection of plans for mass sharing of citizen data that last surfaced in an obscure clause in the 2009 Coroners and Justice Bill, the government has designs on your data.
With Phil Booth - former national coordinator of NO2ID, who now coordinates medConfidential, which campaigns to ensure every flow of data into, across and out of the NHS and care system is consensual, safe and transparent.
Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/228429932/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Why-selling-people-s-medical-tax-school-records-isn-t-open-data-by-Phil-Booth
It’s often said that we know more about space than Earth’s oceans. How then, are marine scientists using new technologies, data science and open data to deepen our understanding of the seas?
Adam Leadbetter is a professional marine data & semantic web geek at British Oceanographic Data Centre - a national facility for preserving and distributing oceanographic and marine data.
Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/227194800/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Oceans-of-data-with-Adam-Leadbetter
With over 5000 community energy groups in the UK, the big question is, what innovative role could open data play in supporting their work? The Open Data Challenge Series is focused on generating innovative and sustainable open data solutions to address the social issues that these community groups are facing.
Hearing from Nick Katz (Locatable), Gerd Kortuem (Energy Schools) and Briony Phillips (ODI) on the journeys that they have taken in the ODCS energy and environment challenges, and the projects that they have developed using open data.
The Open Data Challenge Series is run in partnership by Nesta - the UK’s innovation foundation - and the Open Data Institute. It looks to generate innovative and sustainable open data solutions to social issues through challenge prizes. For each of the seven challenges, projects will compete for a potential £40,000 grand prize.
With UK tenants facing soaring rents, poor conditions, a lack of security and unfair practices from landlords and letting agents - the private rented sector is high on the public and political agenda. The Government says it wants to fix this yet it doesn’t even know how many landlords there are in the country.
Alex Hilton, Director of housing organisation Generation Rent, makes a plea for open data that can inform policy, drive up standards and help renters to get a better deal.
In three years, OpenCorporates has built the largest openly licensed database of companies in the world, growing from 3 million companies at launch to listing over 60 million today. The service is regularly used by journalists, anti-corruption investigators, civil society, banks, financial institutions and governments.
Co-founder, Chris Taggart, discussed the process of building such a database and his journey in understanding the networked corporate world.
The ODI’s Data as Culture art programme aims to engage diverse audiences with artists and works that use data as an art material.
The 2014 commission explores our relationship with surveillance, privacy, and personal data, taking a critical and sometimes comedic look at the power of open data. Works include pneumatic contraptions, satellite imagery, data collection performances, and knitted data discrepancies.
Art curator Shiri Shalmy talked to Open Data institute’s Art Associate Julie Freeman about the curatorial process behind the 2014 Data as Culture exhibition.
Julie Freeman is the Art Associate at the ODI and heads up the Data as Culture art programme. She is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London researching the convergence of biological data and kinetic art.*
Shiri Shalmy is an independent contemporary art curator working with artists and public art organisations nationally and internationally.
The extension of the open data programme to personal data such as medical records was based on the hope that personal data could be anonymised. This is turning into a slow-motion political train wreck, with the care.data scandal and the revelation that the hospital episode statistics data sold to numerous companies contained patient postcodes and dates of birth, so the anonymity claims were simply false.
Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, asks: what’s going on?
In 2010, David Cameron described how he expected an army of concerned citizen to become “effective armchair auditors” and use open data to “look over the books, denounce waste, the expensive vanity projects and pointless schemes that we’ve had in the past”.
Gianfranco Cecconi shared how, on a dull December afternoon in 2013, he rolled up his sleeves and sat in his armchair… to build a map of UK oil and gas licensing. The map shows existing and potential areas where shale gas extraction could take place, according to the latest DECC open data.
Gianfranco explained his findings, what caused him to retrain as a data scientist and how you might get involved in doing something similar.
“Open data wants you, too.” he says.
Ian Holt, Head of Developer Outreach at Ordnance Survey, explained and demonstrated what difference the addition of linked data sets has made to the organisation’s open map data.
Using examples and case studies, he showed what linked data makes possible for publishers and app developers, and what it might mean for those of us who use maps every day.
For our 14th February, 2014 lecture… Climate change is global, yet solving the challenges are often local and bound up in policy making, industrial, organisational and personal decision making.
Co-founder of Cleanweb UK and entrepreneur Chris Adams explained the role can open data play in ensuring a cleaner world, and what data sets still need to be opened up.
At the January 31st lunchtime lecture, Alan Patrick, co-founder of Broadsight, examined what lessons can be learnt from past technologies such as search, and the most likely safeguards required over the next few years. How do prevent abuse of open data by those with ill-intent, or is this a pipe dream?
Open data is expounded as a force for good but is there a risk of glossing over its potential for harm?
Ian Makgill of SpendNetwork, examined government procurement. Can open data be used to protect public investments and deliver an IT project on time and within budget.
SpendNetwork believe that government shouldn’t have to pay for spend analysis, as long as the data is open, and that suppliers need better data on government opportunities.
What does it take to be legally open? Amanda Brock, Director, Origin International Technology Law and Dr Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London, walked us through how to use the law with attitude - Examining the key role of licences and contracts in achieving open software, data, medicine and hardware.
What does it take to be legally open? Amanda Brock, Director, Origin International Technology Law and Dr Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London, walked us through how to use the law with attitude - Examining the key role of licences and contracts in achieving open software, data, medicine and hardware.
Founded in the UK in 2004, inspired by the success of Wikipedia and crowd sourcing information, OpenStreetMap aims to map the world as open data.
The project came into it's own during the 2010 Haiti earthquake where volunteers used available satellite imagery to map the roads, buildings and refugee camps of Port-au-Prince in just two days, to create the most complete digital map of Haiti.
Harry Wood, developer at transportAPI.com, and on the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, introduced us to OpenStreetMap, looking at how volunteer mappers helped with disaster response in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan.
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Jeni Tennison OBE, CTO of the ODI, outlines her version of an Open Data Christmas, by reading her letter to Santa.
For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.
Patrick Hussey, outlines his version of an Open Data Christmas, by introducing his new startup "DataMartyr", Snowden for the Soul.
For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.
Dr David Tarrant, outlines his version of an Open Data Christmas.
For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.
ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture, 13 December 2013.
In a decade of running data-heavy civic tech sites such as FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou and Mapumental, mySociety has learned a lot about how to gather, display, and archive data - and we have the yarns to prove it.
mySociety's senior consultant, Mike Thompson, talked through, amongst other things, why one of their sites breaks on an almost daily basis, how they combined open data sources and a routing algorithm to evaluate the accessibility of Welsh secondary schools and the guerilla data collection methods some councils have used to derive their bin collection calendar.
ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture, 6 December 2013.
Since March 2012 Land Registry has been releasing free datasets to support the UK government’s economic growth, open data and transparency agendas. Understand the data journey of the authoritative source for land and property data and where it’s ambition lies with the Land Registry’s Andrew Trigg, George Davies and Ben White.
Open data from arts and cultural organisations won’t help you choose a school or a hospital or make a financial decision, but it could create new ways of understanding history, experiencing great art and literature, and - fundamentally - help us to understand more about ourselves.
Ahead of the launch of the Culture Hack Open Data Repository, Rachel Coldicutt and Kim Plowright gave an overview of the arts open-data landscape and discussed the importance of making some of our greatest assets open and machine readable.
Rachel Coldicutt is a director of Caper and founder of Culture Hack. She was previously Head of Digital Media at the Royal Opera House.
Kim Plowright does things on the Internet. Her recent projects include D-Day As It Happened for Channel 4 and Pepys Road for Faber & Faber. She created the Culture Hack Data Repository for Caper with Frankie Roberto.
Nearly 70 years of computers, and most of us still just use them as a fast version of paper. What is code? What is data? Teaching everyone to program, restructuring organisations … artificial intelligence. What will it take to make “data” ten times better?
Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki, will take us through examples from working with international agencies and businesses, with a shot of Stafford Beer and a soupçon of PDFs.
Francis spoke on Friday the 22nd of November at the Open Data Institute in London.
Politicians are often criticised for their liberal use of statistics and data, and 2013 has been no exception. Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, examined how politicians lie with data and what we can do about it.
The first of two lectures examining opening up financial data.
The financial sector is a notoriously closed and opaque system, with barriers to entry at many different levels. What elements, technologies and players are required to open it up, and what would the result look like?
Brett Scott, author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money sketches out some ideas from the cutting edge of open source finance.
What if we could play back all the CCTV ever recorded of us? Film maker Manu Luksch did just that with her sci-fi fairy tale film ‘FACELESS.'
Our lives are being captured in a multitude of ways: across social media, mobile and telephone communications, on the street. In the light what’s been reported this summer about the NSA, GCHQ and other governments, Manu’s film is particularly timely.
Using CCTV footage of herself requested via the Data Protection Act and blocking out the faces of anyone else captured on it, Manu's film imagines a faceless world - with herself as the only woman with a face. Manu will be discussing our surveilled society and what the future might hold for us.
The trailer referenced in this podcast can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLzJCeGYgbg
A lunchtime lecture delivered by Ben Worthy, lecturer in politics at Birbeck college, on the 20/09/2013.
Since 2010 local authorities have been required to publish their spending data across England. The promise - that this would create greater accountability and induce a transparency revolution.
Ben Worthy, lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College, University of London will examine the impact of this policy. Who has been using the information, what impact has it had on the public and politicians and what sort of transparency has it created?
With the development of new hardware devices, personal health apps and the ability to process large amounts of data sets, we now have unprecedented means to improve and personalise health care for all.
Yet such a proliferation of data, across many providers, often utilising always-on devices, raises questions such as - who does the data belong to, how should this data be managed, should patients have the right to access the many readings taken of them within a hospital to manage their own overall care?
Technologists have made breakthroughs to do this in a coherent framework of user rights in regards to privacy, user rights and establishing a clear boundary of what is acceptable. Can this work for healthcare?
Yodit Stanton, founder of Atomic Data Labs, will explore the challenges and the moral questions that collecting device data is raising.
Slides for this lecture can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/167920141/Healthcare-data-collection-for-good-or-ill-with-Yodit-Stanton
A lunchtime lecture delivered by Jenni Allen of @WhichUK, on the 19/07/2013.
What to study, where to go, and how to get there? It's an expensive decision and each year prospective undergraduate students have to decide with little objective information.
Jenni Allen of Which? will guide us through how the publication of the Key Information Set has created an open data source that is beginning to help solve this annual, and very personal question.
Jenni will examine the applications and limitations of data in informing student choice and how the Which? University website attempts to take account of both.
A Friday lunchtime lecture, delivered on the 12/07/2013, by the ODI's very own James Smith & Sam Pikesley.
At the Open Data Institute, we build all our technology in the open. This may seem terrifying, but it's probably one of the most powerful things we do. By using open tools and practices, we communicate better as a team, engage with our community, avoid cutting corners, and at the end of the day, produce better results.
The ODI's James Smith and Sam Pikesley will share how we're working underneath the transparent bonnet and what tools and techniques you might consider to begin to do the same.
Friday lunchtime lectures at the Open Data Institute 5 July, 2013
In the age of machine readable data a kind of omniscience is possible for the first time in history. We can know all things at all times and this knowledge is even being used to make predictions not just for the destiny of individuals but for society itself.
Technology is often compared to magic but the divine is increasingly become the more apt description. Justice, the crunching of souls, predestination. Writer and journalist Patrick Hussey asks; do we want to be judged by machines?
Friday lunchtime lectures at the Open Data Institute 28 June, 2013
Finnish democracy activist Aleksi Rossi discusses the big ambition and practical challenge of creating Open Ministry, an online tool for crowdsourced legislation and participative democracy.
Friday Lunchtime Lectures at the Open Data Institute
21 June 2013
Thousands of people worldwide devote their lives to the somewhat obscure cause of 'open government', but so far they remain in the 'geek box', unable to break out into the mainstream and become a massive global movement on the scale of the environmental, human rights and other epoch-defining movements.
Does open data lend itself better to global efforts? Can it bring open government into our everyday lives? Can data not only help us find better commuting routes but also decrease corruption and 'follow the money'? Or is it all just 'open-washing'?
Martin Tisné of Omidyar Network will take us through some of these questions and ask whether we can genuinely drive social change via open data.
Friday lunchtime lectures at the Open Data Institute, 14 June 2013
Is being transparent something for business to fear or something to relish? CEO of CarbonCulture, Luke Nicholson, will take you through the commercial and political advantages brands and institutions are exploring in their use of open data and radical transparency.
Why data geeks don't make decisions: bridging the gap between information and influencers.
Open data might be fuel, but fuel on its own doesn't get you anywhere. To improve public services you need to translate the raw data material into whatever helps people solve their problems. So, how do we bridge the gap from open data geeks to decision-makers?
Tom Smith, founder and director of OCSI, helps public sector organisations use information effectively for policy and decision-making. He will bring in real world lessons of using open data to improve decisions, and more.
Tony White’s new novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South is published by the Science Museum as their Atmosphere commission 2013. The novel was inspired by Tony’s discovery in the archives of a little known science fiction story written in Antarctica in 1911 by Captain Scott’s surviving meteorologist George Clarke Simpson.
Novelist Tony White gave a short reading from Shackleton’s Man Goes South, and explains how he used contemporary climate data and old polar archives to tell a new kind of climate change story.
*Apologies for the slight glitches in this recording.
What has science fiction to say about our data future, and how is the future dreamed of by writers in the past already here? Is it all dystopian gloom with self-aware algorithms taking over the world, or is there plenty of room for hope?
Hitch a ride with writer, technologist and artist, Richard Adams to discover.
The data of democracy and what we can learn from thirty thousand Poles standing in a field.
Anthony Zacharzewski, founder of the Democratic Society, talks about the interface between open data and democratic decision-making, and what we can learn from thirty thousand Poles standing in a field.
On 23 April 2013 the W3C, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Government Partnership met with and at the Open Data Institute to get to know one another. This is a recording of the speeches that took place that included: Nigel Shadbolt Gavin Starks Phil Archer Tom Scott
Friday Lunchtime Lectures at the Open Data Institute, 22 March 2013.
Has most of government data released openly so far been flytipping, little used and of little value?
David Mitton, of ListPoint, will discuss how more value from government data can be realised. Using the national police database as a case study, he will examine how this data was made more widely usable and how IT implementation costs were reduced by 20%, just by surfacing and mapping the data standards.
The National Pupil Database monitors over 400 variables, covering every year of a child’s education from nursery to A-levels. Anyone who attended state schooling in England since 1997 is included; data is taken automatically from school systems and is never deleted. The data is currently used to support decision-making, statistical analysis, targeted funding, performance monitoring and educational research.The government now proposes to 'widen access' to the NPD, making information it contains available to a range of of organisations including commercial enterprises and the media. Can such personal data be treated as open data?
Phil Booth, former national coordinator of NO2ID and co-director of TRUTH2POWER, and Terri Dowty, former director of Action on Rights for Children and also a director of TRUTH2POWER will introduce you to the database, what data is collected and why everyone needs to know how it operates.
The Victorians built vast galleries and museums to house cultural and scientific collections; they were opened to the public and used for educational research. But what are their digital equivalents?
Continuing our investigation into Data as Culture, Bill Thompson, technology writer and current head of partnership development for the BBC Archives, guides us through the BBC Archive and what it will take to build an open digital public space and ensure our digital cultural heritage.
When all around you seems to be going "open", what should you know and bear in mind to avoid a privacy debacle. Unless your data is solely about inanimate objects, there will be privacy considerations for your business or organisation.
Done properly, suitable consideration may be trivial; done badly, it can be catastrophic, and hindsight is always better when the stories are about a different organisation.
With kittens and hopefully some humour, Sam Smith of Privacy International covers how your organisation can avoid a future audience laughing (uncomfortably) at the privacy choices you should have made for your users, your customers and citizens.
This is the recording of a webinar run by Dr David Tarrant to introduce the ODI Postgraduate Certificate in Open Data Technologies with the University of Southampton. To view the corresponding slides mentioned in the webinar go to: To understand more about the course go to: http://theodi.org/excellence/pg_certificate or contact training@theodi.org
Friday Lunchtime Lectures at the Open Data Institute. 22 February, 2013
Chris Vein, former White House deputy CTO and now the World Bank's chief innovation officer, will take us through his experiences of working at the top level of government; and how at he is developing the World Bank's technology strategy to help developing countries build their communications and open government infrastructures.
Friday Lunchtime Lectures at the Open Data Institute. For our fourth lecture... How can open data revolutionise your rail travel?
The release of open data on public transport over the last year has laid bare the the secrets of cheap fares, true timekeeping records and the best alternative routes the official journey planners don't tell you.
Jonathan Raper, digital geographer and founder of Placr, will draw back the curtain on this new era and reveal how you can make the most of it.
Lunch time lectures at the Open Data Institute 8 February, 2013
The passion and excitement around Open Data is palpable across many sectors but what are the benefits and value for business?
Jeni Tennison, Technical Director at the Open Data Institute, will discuss business models that support publishing open data and what further work is required.
Friday Lunchtime Lectures at the Open Data Institute: 25 January 2013. For our third lecture... Legislation as Data
Legislation affects us all. Many of our most important rights, duties and obligations are set out in statute law. What does it mean to think of legislation as data and how might open data thinking help lead us to good law?
John Sheridan, Head of Legislation Services at The National Archives, guides us through legislation.gov.uk. Explaining what aspects of legislation can be represented as data and why the statute book can perhaps be better presented, understood and managed starting from a data perspective.
The slides for this lecture: http://www.scribd.com/doc/122989561/Friday-Lunchtime-Lectures-at-The-ODI-Legislation-as-Data