The potential of open data for the common good

Open Policy Making: engaging citizens in an Hyperconnected

World

Fabrizio Sestini European Commission DG CONNECT

Unit E3 Net Innovation CAPS : Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and

Social Innovation

•  Removing barriers (languages, cultures, religions)

•  New sociological and anthropological models

•  Enabling broader participation (new stakeholders)

•  Creating new forms of "collective intelligence"

•  Big (open) data

•  Exposing "true" social patterns (for health, environment, transport, local admin, etc.)

•  Increasing transparency and accountability

Open policy making: why does "hyperconnectivity" matter?

Integrating Open data and traditional Statistics

Collecting and sharing evidence directly from citizens for better decision making at institutional and personal levels •  WebCOSI (CAPS project): combining official statistics with

data provided by web communities to measure societal progress and well-being

•  Ushahidi: Crowd-mapped information from cell phones, news and the web

•  Safecast: crowd-mapped data about radiation levels

recorded by individual devices

(tweets at Data Innovation for Policy Makers conference, Indonesia Nov. 14)

"Data should always be the basis for every policy decision making process"

Open Networks

Safecast Uses open hardware, sensor networks to capture large open radiation level data sets. Used by citizens to map radiation levels in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. More than 13 Million Data Points have been captured to date.

Scavenging Big (Open) data for Transparency

Getting facts directly from citizens (or open data sets) for better decision making at personal and corporate level •  Theyworkforyou: an open registry of political activities and

votes from MP, MSP or MLA in Parliament

•  WIKIRATE: Enabling citizens to rate companies on corporate social responsibility

•  Open Corporate: an open database on companies and corporations

Open Data

Open Corporates scraping, opening up big data sets Through web scraping Open Corporates make information about companies and the corporate world more transparent and accessible. The data is turned in to searchable maps and visualisations of complex corporate structures.

Opportunities for Open Policy Making

Examples of platforms that integrate social feedback from citizens in decision-making processes: • D-Cent, http://dcentproject.eu (CAPS project): new tools for open democracy, participation, new decentralised electronic currencies • Fix my Street (mysociety) • Your Priority – citizen initiatives, collective deliberation (e.g. Iceland constitution) • Open budget – where does the government spend your money? • Open Ministry (Finland) - crowdsourcing legislation • DemocracyOS (Argentina) – comparing parliament's and citizens' comments on laws • Open Spending – to gather and analyse the financial transactions of governments • Patientslikeme - feedback on medical services • NHScitizen - transforming public services

Democracy ecosystem stages (D-CENT, Nesta)

Multidisciplinary challenges

Legal

Physics

Sociology

Innovation

Economics

Art Psychology

Philosophy

History

ICT

•  Crowd-sourcing, Smart-sourcing, co-creation

•  Simple online reputation mechanisms (based on identity but preserving privacy, creating

quality guarantees for collective systems)

•  Safeguarding privacy for online contributors to participatory systems (or clouds)

•  Motivations and incentives for online collaboration

•  Inclusion (access as well as visualization )