OpenHalton

And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

“I Sing the Body Electric”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855

Last Saturday I was invited to speak at the annual dinner for the IEEE Hamilton chapter at the beautiful Ancaster Mill:

Topic: “I Sing The Data Open” (Open Data Initiatives)

We’ll discuss what’s and why’s of open data, why it’s a big deal both in Canada and WorldWide, how it fits as part of Open Gov initiatives as well as how private companies and organizations can find business opportunities to use open data…

Once in a while I get inspired to build a new talk that not only shares my perspective, but also challenges me to re-visit my own understanding of the subject, check my facts, re-visit concepts and to re-evaluate whether my views have changed. It’s like going through spring cleaning or a mass indexing of your music or video library: a way to find out what I know, while discovering & filling in some gaps along the way.

This was one of those talks.

To be able to articulate the differences between Open Gov, Open Data, Gov 2.0 – I had to re-visit some oldie but oh so goodie definitions such as this one for Open Gov, 8 Principles of Open Data and 3 Laws of Open Data as captured by David Eaves. In the end, I found it necessary to build a Venn Diagram to capture the relationship between Open, Data & Government – to help orient the audience to the area of my interest: Open Data & Open Gov Data at its core. Feel free to re-use (creative commons on Flickr)

Along the way I found some truly great articles, like the one by Melanie Chernoff at RedHat on what “open data” means – and what it doesn’t, crisply articulating the differences between Open Data and Publically Available Data: “All open data is publicly available. But not all publicly available data is open”.

Another post Killer open-data apps from around the world by James McKinney from Montréal Ouvert had a fantastic collection of links that helped me think through different levels of citizens involvement with Open Gov, which I captured as follows:

• transparency: Gov-2-Citizen (G2C), 1-way interaction, i.e. “ here’s the data “ (sites like opencongress.org, openparliament.ca, etc)
• participation: G2C + C2G, 2-way interaction, i.e. “ speak out “ (sites like americaspeakingout.com, citizenfactory.com)
• engagement: C2G, “ take action! “ (sites like apathyisboring.com, mysociety.org)

And finally, as I tried to articulate the relationship between Open Data and Open Gov, and their impact on people’s lives, I thought back to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric”, where he explores the interconnectedness of the Soul and the Body and celebrates the importance of the Body in how it forges connections in our human society.

Borrowing from Whitman, Open Data is to Open Gov as the Body is to the Soul.

Open Gov as a movement and a governing principle is made real by Open Data. It is how an open government can interact with its citizens, and it is Open Data that helps bring to life the principles of Open Gov and through Gov 2.0 forges connections in our civil society.

In the end, I came out not only with a talk that people seemed to have enjoyed, but also enriched my own understanding through the work (and perspective) of others.