Horizon Blog

Open Data Round Up: 27/09/13

Quite aside from the excitement of OKCon 2013 – more on that here – it’s been a stimulating and eventful couple of weeks for open data initiatives across the world. Highlights have included:

  • The Open Knowledge Foundation announced a new partnership with the UK’s Open Data Institute and The World Bank to help policy makers and citizens in developing countries understand and exploit the benefits of open data
  • The Nominet Trust are working with The Housing Associations’ Charitable Trust to launch Housing Data Everything, the largest-ever housing dataset. The project intends to revolutionise the use of data in social housing through increased transparency and improved services. 
  • Martin Tisne of the Omidyar Network wrote a really interesting piece entitled “What’s the point of Open Data?” which argued that data needs to not only be publicly available but also accessible to allow people to make best use of it
  • The Vice-President of the European Commission, Nellie Kroes, gave an interview in which she talked about the benefits of open data
  • ARM‘s Chief Technology Officer Mike Muller recently spoke to Gigaom about the opportunities for data privacy presented by the Internet of Things

Horizon Director Derek Mcauley has also written two really interesting pieces on various aspects of the ongoing personal data and privacy debate:

  • Data where? Mac talks about the technical considerations behind personal data stores, cloud services and the internet of things
  • The Government scheme that’s after your data: a piece for The Conversation which talks about the midata programme and the midata innovation lab in the context of customer engagement, consumer privacy and the technical and legal considerations which still need to be looked at to enable the midata initiative to be successful

So what do you think – can privacy, personal data and open data ever co-exist?