DataParis.io Case Study
Thoughts on french Open Data
When we launched Dataparis.io a year ago now we had no idea of the engagement we would generate. Dataparis.io was an amazing opportunity to understand the stakes of Open Data in France and how to collect and process those datas. I decided to share here the teachings of this experience.
Open data is an occasion to empower citizens and cut off the middle man
History and Judeo-Christian traditions show that we always had “middle mens”. This phenomenon is even more true here in France. By “middle men”, I mean intermediaries. For example, there always was a priest between God and men or politicians between the citizen and the head of state. I mean, we love middle men. And, in the end, this phenomenon often led us to feel dispossessed from power and decision processes.
But for the very first time, we actually have the power to get back a certain form of power on what is going on in our societies.
I believe open data gives us power and control over certain aspects of our lives. This control does not only express through a demand of transparency but mostly through a wish of co-building what could be a new form of governance, a new democracy, more just.
Centralize contrasted datas to better identify opportunities
Another important stake with open data is the actual existence of those datas. Some organisations allow citizens to pull open datas through their platforms (mostly governmental). But those datas unfortunately depends on the good will of few persons in charge of give them back to the people, and god please, in a proper format.
In most cases the most relevant datas are public and therefore free but unfortunately they are not either published, in a good format or centralized.
It was actually the case for the INSEE datas we collected for Dataparis.io. We had to find (even that was not easy), collect and process all the census reports summaries in PDF to build a clean JSON file. Eventually, we found more accurate XLS but, again, we wish things were a little bit more easy when it comes to open data.
Open Data Virtuous circle
Datas standardization is probably the most controversial matter when it comes to open data. Standardization means new processes in internal organizations. The thing is that those organizations (governmental or not) are often kind of hostile to change when it comes to comes to open data.
Yet, there is a real need to be filled up. Properly formated datas (and even APIs) ease their exploitation and support their reuse. Such innovation should encourage administrations and public organisations to produce more datas, even if that production has a cost…
Find a good common reference to engage and activate a buzz mechanism
Our main concern with Dataparis.io was to wrestle with those datas until we created meaning out of them. We wanted to find the right angle of in order to inspire as many people as we could.
The original insight that we relied on was that parisians locate themselves geographically in Paris (and socially !) through the subway stations. Therefore, “Where do you get off?” is not just a simple question it is a way to locate our interlocutor in Paris, of course, but also on a social scale.
By exploiting such a common insight, we encourage people to take over the platform to make their own sociological mapping. By giving meaning to the datas through this insight we were able to really engage people.
Keep It Simple Stupid
Finally, “keep it simple”, this is probably the most obvious teaching but not necessarily the easiest to put in practice. The more complex the data, the more complex the storytelling. Therefore you must keep it simple to allow people to embrace your story.
