Hello everyone.

Thank you for coming.

I'm super excited that we're having Joel

Gurin the author of this book "Open Data Now" to Google.

JOEL GURIN: OK.

Thank you all so much for coming.

I want to say a couple of quick things before we get started.

You can see on this slide I have a website as well as a book.

The website is also open data now,

just for the sake of simplicity.

I use @joelgurin for Twitter I also

use the hash tag #opendatanow.

There is a pattern there.

I'm very happy to be speaking to you today.

Also, if you didn't see it on the way in, on the way out,

there is a sign up sheet if you're

interested in getting free email updates from my website

or from the GovLab.

Please sign up and we'll keep in touch,

because there is a lot to talk about.

So why open data and how did I get into this particular area?

I have to start by saying I am probably by a couple of orders

of magnitude the least technical person in this room right now.

So what you're going to hear from me--

and it is a little humbling, to say the least, to come

to talk about data to Google-- but what

I hope I can bring to this is a sort

of sense of overall perspective and context

from the work that I've done in government and non-profits,

as a journalist and now in academia.

I really have tried to get us a sense and sort of paint

a picture of how open data is being seen and used

in society today that I hope will be helpful to all of you.

And I certainly hope we have a little time for questions.

So my background very briefly-- as Fumi told you,

I began as a science journalist.

I was editorial director, and then

executive vice president of "Consumer Reports" when

we launched consumerreports.org, which

is the largest paid information subscription site on the web

now with about 3 million active paid subscribers.

Shortly after that, I went to the Federal Communications

Commission, began as head of the Consumer Bureau.

And at that point our chairman, Julius Genachowski,

was very interested in figuring out

how we can give consumers help in a simple decision

like choosing a cellphone plan.

Well choosing a cellphone plan ends up

being kind of like solving some difficult problem in topology

or some such thing or at least in

statistics, because there are about 1,000 different cellphone

plans offered by a company like Verizon.

You multiply that by the number of companies,

you factor in the fact that every consumer has

different needs, so it became pretty clear as I was looking

at this and this is a problem is more complicated than it

looks at first.

It also turns out to be very similar to problems

that other government agencies face

in trying to advise consumers on things

like financial services, housing, mortgages, education,

and so on.

So I began talking to people in other agencies

about consumer information, generally.

Out of that I was invited to chair the White House Task

Force on Smart Disclosure.

Smart disclosure being the term that we developed

to describe giving data to consumers

that they can use to make complex decisions.

That report came out last May.

And from that work I became more involved

in open data and open government more generally.

I met Beth Noveck, who some of you

may know as the head of the Open Government Initiative

during President Obama's first term and a real pioneer

and open government and open data.

She has now invited me to come work at the GovLab

that she founded at NYU.

And I'll tell you a few things about that.

And I also have this website and this book on open data

now, so I am sort of running the open data

practice for the GovLab and looking

at the implications of open data in many ways.

Just a couple words about the GovLab.

I won't read what you can see on the screen,

but our basic hypothesis and our mission

is to figure out how to use technology and collaborative

platforms and basically 21st century

approaches to help improve governance and government,

and the way that citizens and government interact.

We think that people should interact with government more

than when they vote once a year or when

they happen to make a comment on We the People petition website

or something like that.

We're looking at ways to really develop

a different level of engagement that

is good both for citizens and for government as well.

And this model of collaborative democracy we feel

has three major modes of operation-

the first one is sharing responsibility,

where a government can take a piece of what

has been a government responsibility

and delegate that to citizens.

And here the paradigm is participatory budgeting,

where in 1,500 cities around the world now

the city government is saying, you take a chunk of the budget

and spend it as you wish.

We think that can be done in many other kinds of governance

situations and that would be very productive.

The second modality is getting knowledge and expertise in.

Figuring out ways that not just the traditional government

advisers, but people with technical abilities,

technical skills, insight into community issues, and so on,

can advise government at the federal, state, and city level

and we're seeing a lot of models for that.

And then the third modality is getting open data out,

which is what I work on and what I'm going to talk about today.

So what is open data?

There are a number of good definitions

that have been done by different groups

like the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight

Foundation.

What I did in writing this book was

to choose a fairly general definition-

that open data is accessible public data that people,

companies, and organizations can use to launch new ventures,

analyze patterns and trends, make data-driven decisions,

and solve complex problems.

This definition incorporates not only

open data from government, which is where a lot of the focus

has been, but also open data from sources like social media.

For many sources that are accessible to you

at Google, and from other kinds of data that companies

themselves may choose to release in different ways, as

well scientific data.

So what you're going to hear me talk about today

is open data in all of those forms

and how they relate to each other,

and how they relate to social and business goals.

I do think-- and I'm certainly convinced having now

worked in this area for a couple of years--

that we're talking about a phenomenon that

has tremendous implications and tremendous impact

potentially not only for business, but also

for as for scientists, for journalists,

for consumers, and for government.

And in many ways, we're starting to see

a convergence of the civic and the commercial uses

of open data, where we're seeing some ventures that

may start as non-profits that turn out to have a sustainable

business model.

And we're seeing businesses that turn out

to be actually extremely mission driven

in their use of open data.

And you'll see many examples today.

What is open data not?

Open data is not the same as big data.

And it's not the same as open government

and it's not even really a blending

of big data and open government.

It's a different kind animal.

Big data also has many definitions.

I think the only thing everybody agrees on, at least when

I ask them, is that when you're talking

about what you mean by big data, we mean like really, really

a lot of data.

Really big data sets, which is not too surprising.

I think you can more accurately say that big data involves

data sets that are at the current limit of our ability

to analyze and use, but, of course, that

limit changes every day.

I do think there are real ways in which the quantity of data

has a qualitative impact.

In the same way that when I came here from New York,

I theoretically could have ridden a bicycle,

or even walked, and taking a plane

is really more than an accelerated way of doing that,

it's a whole different kind of travel.

So I think that big data does have that kind of impact.

But it's not philosophically different in my view anyway

from smaller data problems in the way

that open data is philosophically its own thing.

Open government is very closely related

to the concept of open data, but it's broader.

Open government includes all kinds

of government transparency.

It also includes the kinds of collaboration and things

that I just showed on the GovLab's slide.

So part of it is data related but part of it

is really other kinds of citizen engagement.

So the book does present the grand unified theory

of what is open data in a simple Venn diagram

that you will find in appendix A in the book,

and you can also find on my website

opendatanow.com in a fairly lengthy blog post.

I won't go through all this to analyze it,

but the most important thing to notice

here is that big data, open data, and open government

have several points and areas of intersection.

They are distinct, but they overlap.

And when they overlap, it gets really interesting.

The point in the middle, sector six there,

which is all three things-- these

are large public government data sets like weather, GPS,

Securities and Exchange Commission data center.

This is where we're going to see some of the highest

economic value and some of the highest potential civic value.

But it is by no means the only thing that's

important about open data, or the only kind of open data

that's important.

So that's the terrain.

Having said that, I'm going to take you very quickly,

believe it or not, through what I see as nine open data trends.

I'm going to pose three open open data

questions that I don't have the answers to,

but I think we can all probably discuss and think about.

And I'm going to describe a study that we're now

doing at the GovLab that I think will be of interest you called

the Open Data 500, that I think is going to really help advance

this field.

So let's get started.

So the first trend is liberating government data.

It's undeniable that governments at all levels

not only in the US, but in countries

around the world are now focusing on ways that they can

take data that they control and make

it available to the public as open data.

And in the US, we've seen a major step forward.

Most recently last May, when President Obama

announced the new Open Data Policy.

This policy has been called the biggest change

in how we deal with federal information

since the Freedom of Information Act the 1960s.

It's potentially that big.

There are a lot of questions about how we implement it,

which I'll talk about.

But it is a very ambitious and I think

a very right-thinking kind of program

to make government data open by default.

Meaning that unless there's a security reason or privacy

reason or something like that to keep it hidden, it's open