Tag: opendata

Data Manifesto

a recasting of “information wants to be free”

  1. Data cannot be owned. By anybody.
  2. The natural habitat of data is in the commons. It is born in the commons, and will return to the commons, even if it is granted temporary monopolies. The longer it spends in the commons, the better.
  3. Data is a shared resource, that only exists in relationship to its sources and substrates.
  4. Any party that touches or generates a bit of data has rights and responsibilities about that data.
  5. Rights always have corresponding responsibilities.
  6. Control of data is both a right and responsibility that is always shared.
  7. Privacy is a misunderstanding that does not apply to data.
  8. Data is made more valuable by being connected to other data. Solitary data is worthless.
  9. Data is made more valuable by moving. Storage is weak because it halts, “Movage” is better.
  10. Both directions of movage are important — where it came from, where it goes.
  11. The meta data about where data goes is as important as where it came from.
  12. Ensuring bi-directionality, the symmetry of movage, is important to the robustness of the data net.
  13. Data can generate infinite derivative data (meta data) but they all follow the same rules.
  14. When new data is generated from data (meta data) the rights and responsibilities of the first generation proceed to the second.
  15. At the same time, meta data has claims of rights and responsibilities upon the root data.
  16. Data can be expensive or free, determined by the market. It has no inherent value.
  17. Data is easy to replicate in time (free copies) and difficult to replicate over time (digital decay). The only way to carry data into the future is if it is exercised (moved) by those who care about it.
  18. Like all other shared resources, data can suffer from the tragedy of the commons, and this commons must be protected by governments.
  19. As the number of entities, including meta data, touching a bit of data expands over time, with claims of rights and responsibilities, some values will dilute and some will amplify.
  20. To manage the web of relationships, rights and responsibilities of data will require technological and social tools that don’t exist yet.

Data Incumbency

Open-data requirements could make it clearer who is providing a valuable service and who is primarily exploiting information asymmetries between creators and services. They could help identify the genuine rip-offs that thrive on opacity, such as the chronic underpayment of artists or the role of concert organizers in ticket black markets. They could help answer the perennial question of whether streaming payments and other licensing schemes are fair to artists, based not on a notional “value gap” but on who else is getting a cut.

Freeing FB Friends

There are no easy answers to this privacy-versus-portability conundrum. However, there are a few critical takeaways in terms of things that Facebook can and should do now to promote portability—and which are in its own interest to do, as it may face unwanted regulatory action if it doesn’t. Help Set Clear Technical Standards. Solve the Graph Portability Problem. Allow Competitive Apps to Use the Facebook Platform.

10K Public Domain Genomes

A leading genetic testing company is putting genetic information from the people it has tested into the public domain, a move that could make a large trove of data available to researchers looking for genes linked to various diseases. Ambry Genetics will put information from 10K of its customers into a publicly available database called AmbryShare.

A Data Wikipedia?

Imagine what amazing applications would be created if every programmer in the world had free access to all of these data sets:

  • Map data for all countries in a relatively uniform data format
  • White pages data (names and addresses) for all cities of the world
  • Stock data for all major exchanges for all time
  • Movie showtimes data for all cities in the world
  • Television schedule data for all cities in the world
  • Sports scores and stats for all sports in the world for all time
  • Rich meta data for all musical albums and movies from all labels for all time

The interesting thing is, almost every internet company would benefit if this data were freely available. Most internet companies have embraced open source operating systems because every company needs an operating system, and no company wants their OS to be a competitive advantage – they just want it to work. I would argue we are all in the same boat with these factual data sources. No one really wants factual data accuracy and completeness to be their competitive advantage; we all want the best data possible to build the best products possible, and discrepancies in data quality are artifacts of the extremely inefficient economy of buying and selling data we currently live in. If everyone had the same, high quality data, all of our products would be better for it.

We should create a Wikipedia for data: a global database for all of these important data sources to which we all contribute and that anyone can use.

the mainstream waking up to opendata, perhaps?