open

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.

ODI Fridays: Open Source Finance - What would it look like? with Brett Scott

The Open Data Institute and Nesta are running the Open Data Challenge Series using a challenge prize approach to articulate seven social challenges and explore how to use open data to address them. We’re looking for solutions that show that they have potential to impact positively upon the challenge and which have a credible plan and market.

The Crime & Justice hack took place in Nesta UK offices from the 12th - 13th of October 2013.

The following interview features;

Team name: HackSoc Nottingham

Team members: Philippa Main, Gregor Engelmann, Andrea Raimondi

Crime & Justice Hack: HackSoc Nottingham - Open Data Challenge Series - October 2013

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.

ODI Fridays: Burn the digital paper! A call to arms, by Francis Irving of ScraperWiki

Giles Young (Where's this from) delivers his talk ‘What next for open data and your supermarket shop'. Giles outlines a map to reconnect the consumer with the food chain, offering a new level of transparency around where our food comes from and empowering consumers to make better decisions.

The open data and food research afternoon was part of the "Show me the future of" series that focuses on the potential impact of open data on different established industries. #odifutures

Consumers are demanding to know more and more about the food they eat and where it comes from. Open data is answering some of these demands by allowing people and companies to track supply chains, make better agricultural decisions and healthier food choices.

Giles Young - Show me the future of.... food and open data

Jessi Baker (Project Provenance) delivers her talk 'Telling stories: products and their data', as part of the "Show me the future of... open data and food" research afternoon. Jessie discusses voluntary supply chain transparency, how this can affect brand and how a product is perceived by consumers. 

The open data and food research afternoon was part of the "Show me the future of" series that focuses on the potential impact of open data on different established industries. #odifutures

Consumers are demanding to know more and more about the food they eat and where it comes from. Open data is answering some of these demands by allowing people and companies to track supply chains, make better agricultural decisions and healthier food choices.

Jessi Baker - Show me the future of.... food and open data

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: Five lessons from a decade working with open data

Heike Schuster-James of Digital Birmingham talks about the open data agenda, and what is being done in the city by the council and others to ensure the widest public benefit possible is extracted from the information held by public bodies and organisations.

Open Data in Birmingham

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?

ODI Fridays: Open data - the dark side, with Alan Patrick

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.

ODI Fridays: Data as culture 2014, with Julie Freeman & Shiri Shalmy

This talk was given by Darren Robinson, Head of Energy and Sustainability Research Division, University of Nottingham, at the Show me the future of the built enviroment and open data, in the University of Nottingham, May 19th, 2014. 

In an era of rapid urbanisation we are witnessing increasing demand for additional housing, infrastructure, transport and green spaces to name but a few. We are asking, how open data can help tackle these challenges and how it is already being used by innovative businesses.

http://theodi.org/research-afternoons/show-me-the-future-of-the-built-environment-and-open-data

Slides for this talk can be found here - COMING SOON

ODI Futures - Open data and urban planning, by Darren Robinson

This talk was given by Jonathan Raper, of transportAPI, at Show me the future of the built environment, in Nottingham, 19 May, 2014.

In an era of rapid urbanisation we are witnessing increasing demand for additional housing, infrastructure, transport and green spaces to name but a few. We are asking, how open data can help tackle these challenges and how it is already being used by innovative businesses.

theodi.org/research-afternoons…nment-and-open-data

Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/225057593/ODI-Futures-Transport-information-as-infrastructure-in-the-Future-City-by-Jonathan-Raper

ODI Futures - Transport information as infrastructure in the Future City, by Jonathan Raper

This talk was given by Stuart Chalmers, of BRE, at Show me the future of the built environment, in Nottingham, 19 May, 2014.

In an era of rapid urbanisation we are witnessing increasing demand for additional housing, infrastructure, transport and green spaces to name but a few. We are asking, how open data can help tackle these challenges and how it is already being used by innovative businesses.

theodi.org/research-afternoons…nment-and-open-data

Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/225071534/ODI-Futures-Flash-Talk-Building-Research-Establishment-and-Open-Data-by-Stuart-Chalmers

ODI Futures - Building Research Establishment and Open Data by Stuart Chalmers

Open Data - Jebelean Ovidiu & Nicole Roberts

CityBridge and Wheatley Education Campus in Washington D.C.

Michael Lenczner is the CEO of Ajah, a software company that uses open and public data to help funders and non-profits better understand the patterns, and specifically the risks and opportunities in their funding environment.

Michael Lenczner
www.twitter.com/mlenc

Ajah
www.ajah.ca

Sameer Vasta
www.twitter.com/vasta

Richard Pietro
www.twitter.com/richardpietro

Music: Sheryl's Crush
www.sherylscrush.com/

Michael Lenczner - The New Momentum

As cities develop around the world, air pollution has become a major problem. Even in Paris, pollution peaks in the spring of 2015 made headlines, authorities warning people to stay indoors. 

Doctors and scientists know pollution can be deadly, but they are not very sure how exactly it affects people, as there is a notable lack of data for them to work with. Romain Lacombe is hoping to change that. He is the founder of Plume Labs, a start-up in Paris that is developing personal air monitoring devices.

An evangelist for open data, Lacombe has described himself as "transparency engineer". He worked on open data projects for the French government before starting his own company.

He spoke with RFI’s Sarah Elzas.

Open data about pollution advances democracy

A conversation with Matt Thompson. Since earlier this year, Matt has been deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com, But you might know him from some of his previous career stops. He spent a few years at NPR, heading up some of its most interesting digital initiatives, like Project Argo. Maybe you know him from Snarkmarket, the influential group blog he led with fellow smart guys Robin Sloan and Tim Carmody. Or you may just know him as a provocative thinker on the shape of modern media.

Episode 15: Matt Thompson of The Atlantic | Nieman Lab

Catching the bus in Nairobi can be a frustrating experience. For many people, it involves jumping aboard a matatu — one of the privately run, 14-seater buses that thread the streets of Kenya’s capital. But the government has little oversight of the matatus: since public transport was privatised in the 1980s, they have been poorly regulated and now vary wildly in quality. 

Now, however, a project seeks to bring order to the chaos of Nairobi’s streets. Digital Matatus, a research collaboration between the University of Nairobi, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University in the United States, uses a range of data sources to make sense of the city’s transport system. 

The team has been working with computer science students, tech companies and volunteers to map matatu routes using smartphones, mobile routing apps, satellite positioning and location- linked transport schedules. Its data-driven maps, showing Nairobi’s 130-plus matatu routes for the first time, are freely available to the public. Commuters can now navigate their city more easily and securely, and policymakers can visualise Nairobi’s transport network more clearly, thus improving urban planning.

The next step is to take the project to other places. “If we can have several other cities create data and use it to make decisions, we would be thrilled,” Sarah Williams, professor of urban studies at MIT and the project’s co-leader, explains in this audio interview. “I would love to […] start a trend where informal transit is visualised for everyone.”

http://www.scidev.net/global/transport/multimedia/project-maps-kenyan-buses-smartphones-cities.html

Project maps Kenyan buses with smartphones

Johnson&Johnson CFO Tells Investors To Justify, Not Lower Prices -- from Oct 13, 2015 earnings call

Johnson&Johnson CFO Tells Investors To Justify, Not Lower Prices

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.

open

J. Albert Bowden II