Open Data Institute Podcasts

For our 6 February lecture… How can open data help you choose your job? Choosing a career path isn’t easy. With so many paths to take, it can be difficult to know which would suit us best. Open data can help. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills has developed ‘LMI for All’, an open data portal to support careers guidance. The portal brings together labour market information (LMI) via an API for developers to present in a variety of ways for wide audiences. Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data

For our 30 January lecture… BBC Things - joining up the news with open data Online news organisations are exploring how to describe and connect the content of their stories using tags. The BBC recently opened its tagging data up to the public, with the launch of BBC Things. What benefits does this bring to journalism? Could we use open data to join up a story being told across the web? Join James Logan, Product Owner of the BBC Linked Data Platform, discussed these questions and more at this Friday lunchtime lecture. Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data

Open data holds the potential to open up the energy market in the UK. Small, renewable generators produce almost 15% of the UK’s electricity, but they often lack the industry knowledge to get the best rates in selling their power onto the grid. Open Utility is a company that uses open data to help people buy and sell renewable energy. James Johnston explained their plans to create a peer-to-peer energy marketplace. Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: www.theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love

One thing we won’t be short of in the future is data – we’ll have detailed analytics about how we live and the world around us. But what about the past? Is it possible to pull together data about the history of our cities and gain some insight into the past? In this lecture, Leigh Dodds introduced a project from Bath: Hacked, that is using historical maps and cultural heritage open data to let people begin exploring 400 years of Bath’s history. Leigh Dodds is an associate with the Open Data Institute and the manager of Bath: Hacked’s data store. Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/ODIHQ_tweets Our website: theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love

James Smith, developer at the ODI, is standing for parliament in the 2016 UK general election, and is using open data to do it. In this lecture, he explained how the data that’s out there can provide interesting insights for election campaign planning, and how he’s also planning to publish as much open data as possible on campaign financing. James is passionate about using web technology and Open Data to make a better future for everyone, with a particular interest in the environmental and social benefits that can be created. Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/odi_tweets Our website: www.theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video What is open data?: bit.ly/what-is-open-data Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love

GOV.UK performance is a new approach to improving government services, using data. We show the metrics that matter to the civil servants who provide government services. All the dashboards are public – no usernames or passwords – so the government is accountable for the services it provides. We’re making the map of the UK’s public services and how they connect together. And we’re building this map around the user needs of citizens and businesses. Listen in as we look at how we’re using data to help government meet the needs of citizens and businesses. Henry Hadlow is a designer interested in digital services and beautiful typography. He works at GOV.UK. When he’s not designing he likes to play the accordion. Our videos: bit.ly/odi_vimeo Our photos: bit.ly/odi_flickr Our audio: bit.ly/odi_soundcloud Our slides: bit.ly/odi_scribd Our tweets: bit.ly/odi_tweets Our website: www.theodi.org ODI Summit videos: bit.ly/odisummit_video Music - Cella One Giga Love(CC SA-BY 3.0)https://soundcloud.com/dtape/cella-one-giga-love

If you thought 3D printing was some sort of futuristic sci-fi technology that would never catch on, think again. I can make is a group that produces kits to help teachers, parents and children understand all about 3D printing. Chris Thorpe, I can make’s technology spoke about how the group hopes to help inspire the current school generation to become the engineers, inventors and manufacturers of the future. Chris is a technologist who makes things with code, APIs and now 3D printing. He was once the CTO of Moshi Monsters, the pet monster game that makes parents’ evenings awkward. Our videos: https://vimeo.com/theodiuk Our audio: https://soundcloud.com/theodi Our slides: https://www.scribd.com/OpenDataInstitute Our photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukodi/ Our website: theodi.org

Data from the High Speed 2 project has been released under an Open Government Licence. This has provided companies like Landmark an opportunity to enter the world of “Open”. Jez Nicholson told us about the product that Landmark has built upon the HS2 data and how “Open” may have ultimately changed the business itself. By day, Jez Nicholson is Head of Product Development for a leading property risk assessment company. By night, he is lead developer of OpenPlaques.org. With kind thanks to Thomson Reuters for supporting and hosting this event. Our videos: https://vimeo.com/theodiuk Our audio: https://soundcloud.com/theodi Our slides: https://www.scribd.com/OpenDataInstitute Our photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukodi/ Our website: theodi.org

You don’t have to look far to find pictures and infographics that visualise data to make us understand it better. But musical representations of data are harder to come by. Developer-musicians Nicholas Tollervey and Simon Davy have taken footfall data provided by the Leeds Data Mill and turned it into music for brass band (yes, you read that right). Their lunchtime lecture was a loud, fun and thought-provoking exposition of open data manipulated via the programming language Python into a meaningful musical medium. Nicholas is a programmer, classically trained musician, philosophy graduate, teacher and writer. Simon is a percussionist with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He currently works in Leeds as a computer scientist. Our videos: https://vimeo.com/theodiuk Our audio: https://soundcloud.com/theodi Our slides: https://www.scribd.com/OpenDataInstitute Our photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukodi/ Our website: theodi.org

Everyday our cities generate increasingly vast amounts of data. What happens when this data from across public, private and the third sector becomes open? Mark Barrett argues that focussing our use of local data so that it is “for the city, by the city” is the path towards unlocking the most value from open data. Mark Barrett is an open data lead for Leeds, and created Leeds Data Mill – the open data platform for the city – surfacing public, private and 3rd sector information. He also co-founded and co-run Leeds Data Thing – a group set up to explore the benefits of open data across industries within the city.

Governments hold a lot of data. A huge amount of data. And many are beginning to open it up for citizens and businesses to monitor and improve all sorts of things – from education and public services to crime rates and traffic. But all this data has to be stored, managed and presented in ways people can understand. CKAN is a data management platform used by governments and organisations around the world to handle these important functions. Irina Bolychevsky delivered a live demonstration of its data management workflows, visualisation and discovery features that help make data easy to upload, access and re-use. Irina Bolychevsky is the Commercial Director of Open Knowledge and the former CKAN Product Owner

The Great British Public Toilet Map is an on-going project to map the UK’s public toilets using open data. It began in 2010 when only one council was publishing toilet data and is soon to relaunch with a database of over 5000 facilities. Gail Ramster describes an outsider’s pursuit of local council open data and the obstacles encountered, including Ordnance Survey licensing, FOI legislation and the need for a standard format. Ramster is a Research Associate at Royal College of Art working on people-centred design research.

People tend to think of ‘public goods’ as things like suburban roads that must be built by governments because if governments don’t provide them, then no-one will. But this is an impoverished definition of public goods. In fact, private and public goods operate in an ecology, each reinforcing the other, and they do so in every social organisation we have – within families, suburban football clubs, firms. We will explore these ideas and then focus on open data as the new emergent public good of our time. Nicholas Gruen is a prominent Australian economist and commentator on Web 2.0 and the CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of Peach Financial, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Online Opinion.

People tend to think of ‘public goods’ as things like suburban roads that must be built by governments because if governments don’t provide them, then no-one will. But this is an impoverished definition of public goods. In fact, private and public goods operate in an ecology, each reinforcing the other, and they do so in every social organisation we have – within families, suburban football clubs, firms. We will explore these ideas and then focus on open data as the new emergent public good of our time. Nicholas Gruen is a prominent Australian economist and commentator on Web 2.0 and the CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of Peach Financial, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Online Opinion.

As the open data movement gains momentum, it becomes clear that there are substantial business opportunities to be seized through the use and publication of data. However, using open data can often present new risks which need to be managed. Drawing on some preliminary findings from an ongoing study of SMEs, corporate and public sector organisations, Tom Wainwright seek to provide insight into these issues. Dr Thomas Wainwright is a researcher based in the University of Southampton’s Centre for Innovation and Enterprise.

Open data has the potential to power tools that provide solutions to real problems. Although the UK is the world leader in releasing open data, its use in informing real world solutions has been limited and fragmented, with innovative startups sometimes lacking support and data expertise to scale to a sustainable business level. Hear from the final winners of the first three Open Data Challenges - individuals who have developed a solution to a specific social issue and been supported through their journey by the Open Data Challenge Series to win £40,000. Topics covered will range from helping parents engage with their child’s learning to enabling community energy groups to engage with energy efficiency interventions.

New, cheaper sensor and tracking hardware, and new big data and data science techniques, mean that we can now gather and use huge amounts of real-time data to understand the built environment better. Francine Bennett of Mastodon C talks about the technical challenges, applications, and potential future value of collecting and using data in buildings. Francine is CEO and Co-founder of big data specialists Mastodon C. They offer an open source technology platform and the skills to help users realise its potential, and do so on zero carbon infrastructure. Slides from this lecture can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/232455173/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-The-secret-lives-of-buildings-revealed-with-open-data

The web has transformed our lives so much over the last twenty years that we think of it as an inevitable development and a permanent part of our world. In this talk, Professor Carr explains how the open web we know is just one of many attempts over the last century to build a planet-wide network of information. Why was this one successful? And will it continue to be so? Professor Leslie Carr is a Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton where he researches the impact of network technologies on our lives and economy, and in particular on the research and knowledge industries. Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/230569908/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Open-data-open-web-Just-a-passing-fad-with-Professor-Leslie-Carr

Ben Unsworth explains why data is our next opportunity in the evolution towards a democracy that is less ideological, and more entrepreneurial, collaborative, interactive, and performance-driven – a Public Sector that is about results and better outcomes for citizens. Slides from this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/229833691/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-How-can-local-government-deliver-better-services-with-fewer-resources-using-data

The care.data programme in the NHS came off the rails, despite – or possibly because – officials tried presenting it as an ‘open data’ initiative. It isn’t. But this conflation of ‘data sharing’ with open data is far from unique; from the National Pupil Database to your tax records and Cabinet Office’s resurrection of plans for mass sharing of citizen data that last surfaced in an obscure clause in the 2009 Coroners and Justice Bill, the government has designs on your data. With Phil Booth - former national coordinator of NO2ID, who now coordinates medConfidential, which campaigns to ensure every flow of data into, across and out of the NHS and care system is consensual, safe and transparent. Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/228429932/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Why-selling-people-s-medical-tax-school-records-isn-t-open-data-by-Phil-Booth

It’s often said that we know more about space than Earth’s oceans. How then, are marine scientists using new technologies, data science and open data to deepen our understanding of the seas? Adam Leadbetter is a professional marine data & semantic web geek at British Oceanographic Data Centre - a national facility for preserving and distributing oceanographic and marine data. Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/227194800/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Oceans-of-data-with-Adam-Leadbetter

With over 5000 community energy groups in the UK, the big question is, what innovative role could open data play in supporting their work? The Open Data Challenge Series is focused on generating innovative and sustainable open data solutions to address the social issues that these community groups are facing. Hearing from Nick Katz (Locatable), Gerd Kortuem (Energy Schools) and Briony Phillips (ODI) on the journeys that they have taken in the ODCS energy and environment challenges, and the projects that they have developed using open data. The Open Data Challenge Series is run in partnership by Nesta - the UK’s innovation foundation - and the Open Data Institute. It looks to generate innovative and sustainable open data solutions to social issues through challenge prizes. For each of the seven challenges, projects will compete for a potential £40,000 grand prize.

With UK tenants facing soaring rents, poor conditions, a lack of security and unfair practices from landlords and letting agents - the private rented sector is high on the public and political agenda. The Government says it wants to fix this yet it doesn’t even know how many landlords there are in the country. Alex Hilton, Director of housing organisation Generation Rent, makes a plea for open data that can inform policy, drive up standards and help renters to get a better deal.

In three years, OpenCorporates has built the largest openly licensed database of companies in the world, growing from 3 million companies at launch to listing over 60 million today. The service is regularly used by journalists, anti-corruption investigators, civil society, banks, financial institutions and governments. Co-founder, Chris Taggart, discussed the process of building such a database and his journey in understanding the networked corporate world.

The ODI’s Data as Culture art programme aims to engage diverse audiences with artists and works that use data as an art material. The 2014 commission explores our relationship with surveillance, privacy, and personal data, taking a critical and sometimes comedic look at the power of open data. Works include pneumatic contraptions, satellite imagery, data collection performances, and knitted data discrepancies. Art curator Shiri Shalmy talked to Open Data institute’s Art Associate Julie Freeman about the curatorial process behind the 2014 Data as Culture exhibition. Julie Freeman is the Art Associate at the ODI and heads up the Data as Culture art programme. She is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London researching the convergence of biological data and kinetic art.* Shiri Shalmy is an independent contemporary art curator working with artists and public art organisations nationally and internationally.

The extension of the open data programme to personal data such as medical records was based on the hope that personal data could be anonymised. This is turning into a slow-motion political train wreck, with the care.data scandal and the revelation that the hospital episode statistics data sold to numerous companies contained patient postcodes and dates of birth, so the anonymity claims were simply false. Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, asks: what’s going on?

In 2010, David Cameron described how he expected an army of concerned citizen to become “effective armchair auditors” and use open data to “look over the books, denounce waste, the expensive vanity projects and pointless schemes that we’ve had in the past”. Gianfranco Cecconi shared how, on a dull December afternoon in 2013, he rolled up his sleeves and sat in his armchair… to build a map of UK oil and gas licensing. The map shows existing and potential areas where shale gas extraction could take place, according to the latest DECC open data. Gianfranco explained his findings, what caused him to retrain as a data scientist and how you might get involved in doing something similar. “Open data wants you, too.” he says.

Ian Holt, Head of Developer Outreach at Ordnance Survey, explained and demonstrated what difference the addition of linked data sets has made to the organisation’s open map data. Using examples and case studies, he showed what linked data makes possible for publishers and app developers, and what it might mean for those of us who use maps every day.

For our 14th February, 2014 lecture… Climate change is global, yet solving the challenges are often local and bound up in policy making, industrial, organisational and personal decision making. Co-founder of Cleanweb UK and entrepreneur Chris Adams explained the role can open data play in ensuring a cleaner world, and what data sets still need to be opened up.

At the January 31st lunchtime lecture, Alan Patrick, co-founder of Broadsight, examined what lessons can be learnt from past technologies such as search, and the most likely safeguards required over the next few years. How do prevent abuse of open data by those with ill-intent, or is this a pipe dream? Open data is expounded as a force for good but is there a risk of glossing over its potential for harm?

Ian Makgill of SpendNetwork, examined government procurement. Can open data be used to protect public investments and deliver an IT project on time and within budget. SpendNetwork believe that government shouldn’t have to pay for spend analysis, as long as the data is open, and that suppliers need better data on government opportunities.

What does it take to be legally open? Amanda Brock, Director, Origin International Technology Law and Dr Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London, walked us through how to use the law with attitude - Examining the key role of licences and contracts in achieving open software, data, medicine and hardware.

What does it take to be legally open? Amanda Brock, Director, Origin International Technology Law and Dr Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London, walked us through how to use the law with attitude - Examining the key role of licences and contracts in achieving open software, data, medicine and hardware.

Founded in the UK in 2004, inspired by the success of Wikipedia and crowd sourcing information, OpenStreetMap aims to map the world as open data. The project came into it's own during the 2010 Haiti earthquake where volunteers used available satellite imagery to map the roads, buildings and refugee camps of Port-au-Prince in just two days, to create the most complete digital map of Haiti. Harry Wood, developer at transportAPI.com, and on the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, introduced us to OpenStreetMap, looking at how volunteer mappers helped with disaster response in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan. #odifridays

Patrick Hussey, outlines his version of an Open Data Christmas, by introducing his new startup "DataMartyr", Snowden for the Soul. For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.

Jeni Tennison OBE, CTO of the ODI, outlines her version of an Open Data Christmas, by reading her letter to Santa. For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.

Dr David Tarrant, outlines his version of an Open Data Christmas. For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.

ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture, 13 December 2013. In a decade of running data-heavy civic tech sites such as FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou and Mapumental, mySociety has learned a lot about how to gather, display, and archive data - and we have the yarns to prove it. mySociety's senior consultant, Mike Thompson, talked through, amongst other things, why one of their sites breaks on an almost daily basis, how they combined open data sources and a routing algorithm to evaluate the accessibility of Welsh secondary schools and the guerilla data collection methods some councils have used to derive their bin collection calendar.

ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture, 6 December 2013. Since March 2012 Land Registry has been releasing free datasets to support the UK government’s economic growth, open data and transparency agendas. Understand the data journey of the authoritative source for land and property data and where it’s ambition lies with the Land Registry’s Andrew Trigg, George Davies and Ben White.

Open data from arts and cultural organisations won’t help you choose a school or a hospital or make a financial decision, but it could create new ways of understanding history, experiencing great art and literature, and - fundamentally - help us to understand more about ourselves. Ahead of the launch of the Culture Hack Open Data Repository, Rachel Coldicutt and Kim Plowright gave an overview of the arts open-data landscape and discussed the importance of making some of our greatest assets open and machine readable. Rachel Coldicutt is a director of Caper and founder of Culture Hack. She was previously Head of Digital Media at the Royal Opera House. Kim Plowright does things on the Internet. Her recent projects include D-Day As It Happened for Channel 4 and Pepys Road for Faber & Faber. She created the Culture Hack Data Repository for Caper with Frankie Roberto.

Nearly 70 years of computers, and most of us still just use them as a fast version of paper. What is code? What is data? Teaching everyone to program, restructuring organisations … artificial intelligence. What will it take to make “data” ten times better? Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki, will take us through examples from working with international agencies and businesses, with a shot of Stafford Beer and a soupçon of PDFs. Francis spoke on Friday the 22nd of November at the Open Data Institute in London.

Politicians are often criticised for their liberal use of statistics and data, and 2013 has been no exception. Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, examined how politicians lie with data and what we can do about it.

The first of two lectures examining opening up financial data. The financial sector is a notoriously closed and opaque system, with barriers to entry at many different levels. What elements, technologies and players are required to open it up, and what would the result look like? Brett Scott, author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money sketches out some ideas from the cutting edge of open source finance.

What if we could play back all the CCTV ever recorded of us? Film maker Manu Luksch did just that with her sci-fi fairy tale film ‘FACELESS.' Our lives are being captured in a multitude of ways: across social media, mobile and telephone communications, on the street. In the light what’s been reported this summer about the NSA, GCHQ and other governments, Manu’s film is particularly timely. Using CCTV footage of herself requested via the Data Protection Act and blocking out the faces of anyone else captured on it, Manu's film imagines a faceless world - with herself as the only woman with a face. Manu will be discussing our surveilled society and what the future might hold for us. The trailer referenced in this podcast can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLzJCeGYgbg

A lunchtime lecture delivered by Ben Worthy, lecturer in politics at Birbeck college, on the 20/09/2013. Since 2010 local authorities have been required to publish their spending data across England. The promise - that this would create greater accountability and induce a transparency revolution. Ben Worthy, lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College, University of London will examine the impact of this policy. Who has been using the information, what impact has it had on the public and politicians and what sort of transparency has it created?

With the development of new hardware devices, personal health apps and the ability to process large amounts of data sets, we now have unprecedented means to improve and personalise health care for all. Yet such a proliferation of data, across many providers, often utilising always-on devices, raises questions such as - who does the data belong to, how should this data be managed, should patients have the right to access the many readings taken of them within a hospital to manage their own overall care? Technologists have made breakthroughs to do this in a coherent framework of user rights in regards to privacy, user rights and establishing a clear boundary of what is acceptable. Can this work for healthcare? Yodit Stanton, founder of Atomic Data Labs, will explore the challenges and the moral questions that collecting device data is raising. Slides for this lecture can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/167920141/Healthcare-data-collection-for-good-or-ill-with-Yodit-Stanton

A lunchtime lecture delivered by Jenni Allen of @WhichUK, on the 19/07/2013. What to study, where to go, and how to get there? It's an expensive decision and each year prospective undergraduate students have to decide with little objective information. Jenni Allen of Which? will guide us through how the publication of the Key Information Set has created an open data source that is beginning to help solve this annual, and very personal question. Jenni will examine the applications and limitations of data in informing student choice and how the Which? University website attempts to take account of both.

A Friday lunchtime lecture, delivered on the 12/07/2013, by the ODI's very own James Smith & Sam Pikesley. At the Open Data Institute, we build all our technology in the open. This may seem terrifying, but it's probably one of the most powerful things we do. By using open tools and practices, we communicate better as a team, engage with our community, avoid cutting corners, and at the end of the day, produce better results. The ODI's James Smith and Sam Pikesley will share how we're working underneath the transparent bonnet and what tools and techniques you might consider to begin to do the same.

Friday lunchtime lectures at the Open Data Institute 5 July, 2013 In the age of machine readable data a kind of omniscience is possible for the first time in history. We can know all things at all times and this knowledge is even being used to make predictions not just for the destiny of individuals but for society itself. Technology is often compared to magic but the divine is increasingly become the more apt description. Justice, the crunching of souls, predestination. Writer and journalist Patrick Hussey asks; do we want to be judged by machines?

Friday lunchtime lectures at the Open Data Institute 28 June, 2013 Finnish democracy activist Aleksi Rossi discusses the big ambition and practical challenge of creating Open Ministry, an online tool for crowdsourced legislation and participative democracy.