Open Data: How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going

Rufus Pollock at the Lift 12 conference. More info in http://okfn.org/opendata/ , where the video is embedded.

(lift)

(lift 12 - Feb 24 2012 - Geneva)

(Rufus Pollock - Stories)

[Rufus Pollock] Just to say for those of you who don't know:

the Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit -- not for profit

founded in 2004

and which builds tools and communities

to create, use and share open information

and that's information that anyone can use, reuse and redistribute.

(missed words: "and as such"? check) we've been working on Open Data for quite a long time,

since we started in 2004.

And today, I want to start this story by going back in time 5'000 years,

to ancient Mesopotamia.

There, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers,

flourished the Sumerian civilization.

And they were confronted by a problem.

They were confronted by the limitations of human memory

in the recording of taxes, food and other goods.

And those ancient civil servants and businessmen hit on a novel solution:

What they decided to do was they would start counting things with small clay chips,

which they would bake inside of a clay -- a little clay box

and then mark, on the outside of that box, what they were counting.

You know, was it grain, was it tax payments, whatever.

And so, born out of necessity for a state and a society,

came one o the great information technology revolutions of all time: writing.

The Sumerians invented writing via cuneiform.

And if we fast-forward from that a few thousand years, we come to the UK census.

Again, it's always interesting that states governments are often at the forefront

of at least driving information technology and information systems innovations.

The UK census: again, the state that it is in during the Napoleon Wars.

Desire to count the population more accurately:

we have the first UK census in 1801.

And in the US, they also had censuses, in fact starting in 1790.

And one of the problems encountered in the 1880 census

was they tabulated the census by hand.

And by the 1880 census, it was taking seven years to tabulate the census.

So often you got -- take the 1880, it wasn't until 1887 they actually had any data they could use.

And they calculated that for the next census in 1890,

they wouldn't be finished by 1900.

They still wouldn't have the results of the census by the time they started the next one.

They had a crisis of information technology.

And what they went and did is they commissioned Owen (check) Hollrith

to build the first automatic tabulator.

And for those of you who know your company history, of course,

Owen (check) Hollrith company went on to be one of the founders,

if you like, one of the companies that came and created IBM. (2:38)

And IBM, by the sixties, were building their -- they replaced those hand --

those kind of wooden tabulators with this stuff:

digital tabulators, the modern computer of this age

and again, much of this -- I don't know if you guys know --

IBM would have gone bankrupt

if it hadn't been for Franklin Roosevelt passing the Social Security Act in the States,

which necessitated (check) a huge amount of new tabulation.

So, again, a lot of innovation in this space came out of government need

and also, of course, the nuclear program,

the other great needer of computer power.

And today, today, we find ourselves again in the midst of a revolution.

It's a revolution driven by two needs:

one that has been the same throughout the histories I've just shown,

information complexity, which is the necessity,

and information technology, which is the opportunity.

And what we're doing in this case is a policy innovation, if you like.

We're innovating by opening up information. (3:36)