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.

The goals of inclusive data – Tracey Brown – Inclusive Data Roundtable 2021-03-03

Opening remarks – Dr Milly Zimeta – Inclusive Data Roundtable 2021-03-03

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.

ODI Fridays: Which university? Why university students should care about open data with Jenni Allen

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.

Access to the right health data for public good

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).

Provocation 1 – Dr Milly Zimeta – Octavia’s new suns

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 5 – Dr Julia Stoyanovich – AI, Responsibly

Provocation 4 – Dr Adrian Weller – Faith and AI

Provocation 3 – Dr Rumman Chowdhury – Algorithmic bias

Provocation 2 – Dr Jeni Tennison – Experimentalism and equity

Provocation 1 – Dr Mahlet (Milly) Zimeta – Le Guin's left hand of data

Provocation 6 – Dr Aaron Franks – Community data

Provocation 3 – Prof Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder/Chief Research and Development Officer, The GovLab

Provocation 1 – Rudi Borrmann, Lead, Open Government Partnership Local

Keynote – Prof Jenna Burrell, Director of Research, Data & Society

Provocation 3 – Jessica Kiessel, Senior Director, Learning & Impact, Omidyar Network

Provocation 1 – Dr Angeline Wairegi, Senior Research Fellow, CIPIT, Strathmore University, Kenya

Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: Opening Remarks From Our Head Of Public Policy Dr Mahlet (“Milly”) Zimeta. June 2022

Opening remarks, ODI Head of Public Policy Dr Mahlet(Milly)Zimeta | Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin

Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: A Provocation On Valuation From Professor S Craig Watkins, University Of Texas At Austin. June 2022.

A Provocation On Valuation, Professor S Craig Watkins, University of Texas.Experimentalism/Le Guin

Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: A Provocation On Valuation From Professor S Craig Watkins, University Of Texas At Austin. June 2022

A Provocation On Evidence From Dr Omar U. Flóres, Latinx In AI: Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin

Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable: A Provocation On Evaluation From Davey Jose, Artist. June 2022

A Provocation On Evaluation From Davey Jose, Artist | Experimentalism/Ursula Le Guin roundtable

Provocation 3 – Professor Michael Sanders, the Policy Institute at King’s College London

Provocation 2 – Piret Tõnurist, OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

Provocation 1 – Juan Mateos-Garcia, Nesta

Keynote – Dr Patrick Noack, World Economic Forum

Introduction – Gavin Freeguard, Special Adviser, ODI

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)

How access to real time national data could help businesses recover from the pandemic

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.

Friday lunchtime lecture: Open wide? Business opportunities and risks in using open data



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.

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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

Friday lunchtime lecture: Time travelling with open data

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.

Sound Artist Alex McLean on Live coding, algoraves and opening up music algorithms

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.

ODI Inside Business: Why data literacy is needed in the boardroom

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.

Popular tracks by The Open Data Institute