There is a rich tradition of profound artistic enquiry engaging in new media technologies going back to the 1960s. Artists are coding, sculpting, visualising, sounding out new kinds of art object, and new possibilities for participation, new ways of seeing, new ways of being. We can reach out and play with every image and word ever created, every idea ever thought of, it is all there, right in front of us. We can endlessly recombine and reconfigure, we can travel through time, instantaneously connect with people and places at all points on the globe.

Times of change and transformation often inspire profound art. Artists have charted and led the upheavals in digital culture, and the radical social change that follows in its wake. An instinct within many media artists is not to think only of what digital tools can offer, but to want to shape and influence the way digital technologies develop, and how they impact on, or are shaped by society.

As the digital space moves from novelty into everyday, it is becoming the site of more sustained, original artistic engagement than ever before. The digital is today so pervasive it has little use as an organising term, it is now one among many spaces that artists can engage in or draw upon.

Today the critical vision and competency embodied in the new media arts field has ever greater relevance, as its ways of working, and vocabulary resonate so much more widely. This creates an opportunity to communicate the values that are so vital and cherished, and to deepen engagement in shared interests (e.g. peer to peer, collaborative culture).

The digital space has contributed to new approaches to being an artist, and to engaging with people-formerly-known-as-audiences. New audiences include active participants and also lurkers, the invisible audience whose gravitational pull is shaping online life. Arts policy often focuses on the benefits for audience development and accessibility. This is important, but our imagination should not end there.

Now is a time to appreciate how the digital plays out within art, and to promote the important political and social space that is at stake. We need spaces where artists have free rein, and you can rub technology against the grain.

- Drew Hemment, Founder of FutureEverything

As mentioned in the title I am no expert in this area and I would appreciate any correction or amendments to my understanding.

Traditionally public data has been closed so that the only way you could get access to data to build products was by buying a licence to use. In many cases these licences were expensive and restrictive. The to mitigate this cost often the licence would also have some level of service agreement built in. You paid for the licence for the data and the data provider would provide you with a level of continuity and support. This helps to limit risk and encourage investment into a product.

The closed ‘paid licence’ system generally has a high barrier to entry ‘price of licence’ limiting the amount of innovative products developed. If innovation ecosystems are ideas that live with most failing. The price of failure being too high could have a chilling effect on the whole system.

One of the first licenses used for the release of Open Data was Creative Commons CC-BY-SA. This licence allowed people to create services and products off the back of the data as long as they attribute where the data came from and share back any data that was created off the back off the originally released dataset (value-added data). The original Creative Commons licenses were devised as an answer to restrictive copyright laws relating to ‘works’ – articles, text, images, music etc., as these were deemed increasingly anachronistic in the digital age. It is up for discussion if data can be deemed as a ‘work’ in the context of this licence.

The Open Database Licence (ODbL) developed by Open Data Commons, was created to address the doubt that data could be seen as a ‘work’. It carries the same attribution and share alike clauses and is used by many datastores including the newly opened Paris Data datastore.

Anyone can develop products and services that use datasets with these licences but intellectual property doesn’t extend to the value-added datasets created in the process of developing these products. Releasing value-added datasets back to the community allows further innovative products to be released off the back of these datasets, so potentially the pace of innovation could be increased – It is analogous to the ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ idea.

By imposing further use of value-added data by other organisations might chill the development of products that create value-added data.

With the above licences there is generally no liability or guarantee of service from data providers. This creates a greater risk scenario. If you were investing in product development this potentially is a source of concern and may be an inhibiting factor

In the UK we have the recently released Open Government Licence. That was developed specifically for government data. It borrows from some aspects of the CC-BY-SA licence and ODbL. Unlike those licences there is no need to share back value-added data.

Would this have any impact on products and services that are developed from Open Data? Again in the licence there is no liability or guarantee of service from the data provider but the developing organisation gets to keep all the rights on the products and services they develop – including value-added datasets.
The advantage of this could be that by allowing people to keep hold of the rights to the products that they develop might be mitigate against the exposed risk posed by the lack of liability and guarantee. The main disadvantage could be that the pace of innovation could be curtailed due to people having to replicate process and value-added datasets.

Victoria Moody and myself did a presentation on DataGM with other presentations by David Hytch of GMPTE, Jonathan Raper of Placr.com and Razia Ahamed and Richard Russell from Google all who extol the virtues of open and free data

I was surprised by the level of enthusiasm and practical need expressed by the participants as to what data should be made available, how it would help them deliver services or enable them to create innovative products. There is a real desire for data as demonstrated in the image and hopefully we will be able to locate this data if it exists.

One participant did raise a concern about the dangers of allowing data especially transport data to be made openly available and it centred around the argument of command and control.

Essentially the argument was that travel systems are complex in nature and system optimised. If certain events happen within the system you need to be able to control how the public reacts and need to get them to do what you need them to do. This all sounds fairly logical. Situations have been modelled and contingencies planned for – it is for the benefit of the people that these systems are in place. If people are able to decide for themselves in these situations then you could potentially end up with chaos with all the risks that would come from it. All well and good in a world of predictable behaviour, but there is a lack of trust of command and control systems. Perhaps because they don’t work that well and even if they do work well, they aren’t perceived as working well.

Most command and control systems work on the model of the dumb citizen. An individual who has no prior knowledge of the last time they were in a similar situation, whose only motivation for driving on a motorway or standing at a railway station is that it is what people do. Command and control systems work on the basis of the isolated individual, not the social, perceptive one. But we are social we talk to each other, we make decisions based upon what others are doing or what information that we can gather from friends, acquaintances and the situation around us.

There is distrust of the official line, perhaps because the official line hasn’t worked too well in the past. Human systems are dynamic and social, and giving people access to the data to make informed decisions instead of relying on them to passively obey commands probably might make for a better system after all.

The government is pushing for public bodies to be more accountable, transparent and efficient – a mantra that could come from any mainstream party. I haven’t heard of one whose manifesto was to be oblivious, opaque and unwieldy. But it seems that the pace of the change that is being forced onto the public sector has made Open Data in the eyes of some, an ideological movement and this has created the usual resistance and disengagement.

Since the launch of DataGM last month it feels as though there has been a shift in attitude towards Open Data in Greater Manchester. DataGM is tangible people can see what we have been talking about. Also it has come about extremely quickly which is rare for a public sector based initiative.

This month’s at the DataGM meeting was really positive with talk about the best way for public bodies to engage with DataGM and a plan to see whether GM local authorities can all release the same kinds of datasets to see if Greater Manchester-wide coverage could be achieved.

There was talk of trying to get to real-time refuse lorry data so that people didn’t miss their collection. This sounded like a novel and potentially useful utilisation of the data. There was a brief discussion as to who actually owned the data – the council or the contractor and it did seem a potentially difficult dataset to release. A representative from the Fire Service butted in and said that the most common type of fire within Greater Manchester were fires started in bins that had been left out overnight. All of a sudden we could see that a dataset that had novel value could potentially save a lot of money. (You can see how many fires are started in bins as the Fire Service has released all their very detailed call out data on DataGM)

I was talking to a colleague about this and used the analogy of Open Data being like a Magic Eye picture – the type you used to get in the 90s. You don’t see anything until some change in perception happens and then you can’t see anything else but the hidden picture.

To this end, I was invited to talk about Open Data at a workshop and seminar organised by Gerd Kortuem Lancaster University today – 21st March.

As preparation Gerd and myself sourced datasets and applications to use in the session. I would give background to the Open Data Cities project and case for Open Data and the assembled people would then come up with some cool ideas. It sounds a bit like a standard hackday but there were a number of differences that created some interesting ideas.

1. Sample datasets were provided in advance, these had been chosen from data.gov.uk, datagm.org.uk and Vancouver.

2. The workshop was multi-disciplinary so included coders, social scientists, designers and other disciplines

3. Although some of the participants knew each other, the uniting feature was that they were all post grads or lecturers from Lancaster University who were interested in finding out more about Open Data

4. People were arbitrarily put into work groups

5. The groups were given an hour to come up with an idea which they then had to present with the data that they had chosen and groups then developed the ideas

The event was mostly structured but crucially groups were allowed to come up with any idea as long as it could be realised by the data that they had been given. The mixing of the participants forced people to work together across disciplines and also probably reduced impact of preconceived ideas.

Obviously the availability of available datasets predetermined to a degree what groups developed. As there is a lot of good quality data available from Trafford a number of applications were developed for that area but these could be ported to other areas if similar data became available. There were also a number of applications based on Vancouver data.

Some of the ideas that came out of the workshop included.

An application that would help politicians campaign more effectively using Open Data. A bit like having a pocket researcher and advisor. This could also be used be non politicians as well.

Two Vancouver based applications that merged data around street vendors, public spaces, toilets and water fountains

An application called Tree Hugger that identified trees, encouraged you to go find specific species of trees, photograph and share.

And several applications to encourage people to move into the Trafford Borough, marrying up crime stats, school results, amenities and public transport.

It is obvious that by engaging with HE and FE and demonstrating the opportunities that are out there, cool ideas can be created and realised. Education is a crucible of fluid ideas and differing approaches and the latent creativity within these establishments has the potential to boost Open Data innovation.

The DataGM team of Victoria Moody, Phil Welch and myself met John Garner, David Hytch and Craig Berry to see how things were progressing with the fledgling DataGM – Greater Manchester Datastore.

Among the items up for discussion was how the Open Data community was embracing the release of GM transport data and making data that might be released in difficult proprietary formats more useable. From GMPTE’s point of view this was seen as evidence that there was a demand in the developer community for data and a good thing.

As mentioned previously we are organising with MDDA a series of Thematic Open Data Hack Days. The first one on Saturday 9th April is on Transportation and we requested if GMPTE or TfGM as it will be after 1st April will be able to support this through access to more data and incentives and hopefully this will happen.

A point that I was keen to impress was the imposition of the Traveline Code of Conduct on the bus timetable data that GMPTE was releasing. When the data originally manifested itself on DataGM we released it under the ‘Open Government Data License’ which doesn’t fit with the Code of Conduct. Traveline brought the issue up with GMPTE and we had to put the Code of Conduct back on it. In the meeting we clarified the position that it was GMPTE’s data and that it should be made available under the OGDL – This has now been implemented on DataGM.

At the moment GMPTE is auditing their datasets and have identified approximately 150 that they think could be released including realtime data. This offers a number of technical challenges as realtime data can overload a poorly configured system.

GMTU and GMTCU look after the road system in Greater Manchester and create data around usage and crashes. These units will fall under Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) when it replaces Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive (GMPTE) on April 1st.

Initially it seems as though there is a willingness to release data but main challenges to this will be how to handle realtime data without making systems fall over with too many requests.

Some of the really nice datasets that might manifest themselves on DataGM soon are realtime roadworks across the region, live car park capacities and the positions of traffic lights across the region. We might also get a feed of phases of these lights which would be amazing.

More practically by releasing traffic accident data we might see people creating safer routes to school and safer cycling applications. Also it might enable people to put pressure on their council to create a safer urban environment.

The first ‘Lovely Data’ Hackday will be looking at transportation so if you’re interested in building something or are just interested come and get involved.

Other ‘Lovely Data’ Hackdays will be looking at democracy, culture, health and amenities.

Question – How does infrastructure become more innovative?

As cities become programmable, sentient, so the interface between physical and digital systems becomes increasingly significant.

How does infrastructure become more innovative? Deployed infrastructure needs to be tested, reliable, generic. But there is space for innovation in its development, in the creation of the wider ecosystem, and the development of services. We can create infrastructure that enables innovation. Stimulate a mashup culture so that people can build new services.

One way to stimulate innovation is to make infrastructure more open ended, open source. This needs to be done in a controlled, managed way. You cannot give an open API to critical infrastructure. There are real challenges, if you open systems up they become more open to abuse, they can become more invasive, and privacy and control can be challenged.

The lifecycle of big, physical infrastructure can be 15 years, and soft, digital infrastructure only 40 weeks. Digital systems need long-term sustainability, and big infrastructure needs to be more responsive so that it can evolve and adapt to changing circumstances.

A technology only comes to life once it is in use, and many applications are not foreseen, as in the example of SMS. Co-design and open innovation need to be a part of infrastructure development. Deploy prototypes in living labs, let users shape it, give access to artists, be open to unexpected, surprising outcomes.

ROI is not always the best metric when seeking innovation, as it encourages short-term gains. There needs to be space for “creative misuse”: make infrastructure free to use for non-commercial use, let researchers, students, artists, even early-stage bootstrapping startups use the infrastructure for free under reasonable constraints, including the transition to being a paying customer if they are successful. Playful experimentation can support innovation and make it more useable and friendly, overcoming barriers to adoption.

Building infrastructure as a single, monolithic entity can only done by the large technology companies. One alternative is confederated projects with many small contributors. These require an environment in which people work together, and a supporting infrastructure to track contributions, split rewards.

The traditional way of doing infrastructure is linear, create the technology and a business case, and roll it out. There is increasing awareness this does not work unless you also support the development of the wider ecosystem and engage communities of users.

DataGM is an example of an infrastructure designed to enable innovation, it will succeed when people innovate. Another is the PD-Net project at Lancaster University which approaches networked displays as an open platform instead of a closed technology, and is developing an ‘app store’ for public displays.

Drew Hemment, 24 Feb 2011
FutureEverything & Lancaster University

Thanks to Julian Tait, Adam Lindsay, Adrian Friday

The event announced the first open data published, introduced the website, and consolidated the political commitment to DataGM. It is a soft launch, still early in the journey, and we can expect much more data to be made freely available over the coming months and years.

Open Data is a movement that is spreading around the world to open up publicly held databases. We are entering what Nature magazine called a big data society, we are creating ever bigger databases, where the buses are in real time, local climate, census data, the details of daily life captured in our electronic interactions. Open Data enables greater transparency in government, and it can spark an innovation ecology, as people are able to build services and create value (social and economic) by using the data.

Demonstrating the political muscle now behind DataGM, speakers at the launch included included Cllr Matt Colledge (Leader, Trafford Council), Emer Coleman (London Data Store, GLA), Janet Callender (Chief Exec, Trafford Council), Theresa Grant (Deputy Chief Exec, Trafford Council), David Hytch (Director of IT, GMPTE Public Transport Executive), Kevin Hoy (Greater Manchester Police), and Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation & Public Sector Transparency Board).

Opening the event was Emer Coleman, who spoke about the London Data Store, and argued not to limit our imagination by what uses we can see today, if we can see it today it will probably be out of date. The technical format is not important just publish the data and let others worry about the format. Indeed, its not the data that is important, its about the public realm and the innovation and services it can leverage.

Theresa Grant and Cllr Colledge of Trafford Council presented compelling arguments for how Open Data can have a major, positive impact on citizens and services in Manchester.

Greater Manchester Police famously released 24 hours of emergency calls in real time on twitter, tweeting every call, uncensored, and Kevin Hoy talked about the motivation and impact of this globally celebrated instance of a public service opening up to the outside world. This was “Out-Tweeting Twitter”, and the police were sent “to Twitter jail” as their account was locked due to high traffic. They got around this by setting up multiple twitter accounts, and switching between them – they got 30-40 mins out of an account before was locked. They took care that people couldnt be identified by the crimes that were reported, and the experiment was a huge success, taking them from 3000 to 19000 followers in a single day. The new focus for GMP is hyper local engagement – they now have very local, individual accounts for single policemen, who tweet about local issues, tell people where they are, and give advice on what they can do locally to prevent crime, plus they are seeking to share content with external hyper local sites.

David Hytch from GMPTE is an important advocate for digital culture in Manchester. Hytch presented the case the proprietary systems tend to close things down and prevent people generating value, and that it is commercially astute to open data, in addition to the clear public interest. He talked about the kinds of smart transport applications we might expect that use real time data. If we know where the buses are in real time, we can delay the red light so the bus can get through on green. GMPTE identified 150 transport related datasets found in a Data and Information Audit 2010/11, and that may be just scratching the surface.

Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation and Public Sector Transparency Board (with Francis Maude, Tom Steinberg, Nigel Shadbolt, Tim Berners-Lee) also said a few words. He commented on datasets that everything else ties into — postcodes is a key one, because most people know this, but dont know their latitide and longitude — these are “infrastructural datasets” which are vital for developments in this area.

The discussion that followed considered how we enable the innovations to last over time, given in public infrastructure (such as transport) people tend to think in terms of 15 years, not 40 weeks. Generally, how can these systems be made sustainable? On the data side, there are practical steps such as factoring in hosting costs to projects. On the apps and services side, to an extent we can depend on the innovation and competition in the market helping to make this sustainable, the robustness is out there. Some apps will be developed within a community, and be maintained by that community as long as they play an important role. On the other hand, there are specialist populations with specific needs that may be too small to provide return on investment, and there is a case for these apps to be supported through the support agencies organisations that support those populations. For people with disabilities, for example, it might help if in a transport app you can set the time of the warning message longer, or have a voice alert as well as visual.

No one knows what the rules of the game are yet, things need to be evolved over time, best practice will evolve because people try things and put things to work, rather than top down standards, people are just keen to make things work.

The first wave of apps is visualisations, the second is about integration of data, which involves greater value generation, and greater effort. Rufus’s example is that people will want to know more than data on > £500 spend, they will want to see companies who are getting multiple contracts in different authorities acorss the country.

What was evident is that the Open Data initiative has matured and that the energy and enthusiasm from the people in the room bodes well for the future of Open Data in Greater Manchester.

Read more on Guardian and bobop blog.

Drew Hemment & Julian Tait