Open Data : Portal or Marketplace?
Rethinking Reuse of City Data
Open data movement, an idea that stipulates that data should be made available to everyone free from any legal and technical restriction, has largely been championed by public sector and tech companies. While hundreds of cities and municipalities embraced it, the interaction so far is typically demand-supply side where government or corporation provides highly curated datasets through open data portal which in turn are used by the public. However, there hasn’t been many good examples where it is not dictated by this norm despite it is evident that the government can only disseminate so much data. One might argue that in daily life, city dwellers uses far more private sector data through mobile apps and digital services.
Just as businesses have information that could be valuable to local authorities, citizens may have information valuable to businesses or volunteer groups…. In short, city data lies in many places and could deliver value to different people.
Eddie Copland, a director from Nesta Innovation Lab, argued that this unidirectional flow of information restrict the potential of open data as a transformative form of knowledge exchange. He proposed something called City Data Marketplace (CDM) where the interaction happens between creators and consumers regardless of their affiliation. It is reasonable to assume that government have needs of data which can be fulfilled by individual, communities, or even corporations. Conversely, organizations can list their dataset along with desired pricing (or even for free) at the marketplace, which eases the discovery process.
While many supports this idea as the next step of open data portals, some voiced the concern that this can pave the precedent where datasets that are freely available now to become monetized and commercialized. In fact, tech companies whose services used by millions daily such as Uber or Yelp already sell their data to advertisers or market research companies as one of their revenue stream, while also provide small subset of them (often aggregated) freely to developers through API as they transform themselves from mere app to large platforms. While the idea of massively increased data-driven innovation enabled by a thriving marketplace sounds appealing, one might wonder whether it’s an idea too far ahead — at a time where it’s often very hard to assess the real-world impact of current generation of open data portals.
