Next Steps for Open Data in New Brunswick
With the Canadian Open Data Summit events taking place over the last couple days in Saint John, including Premier Gallant’s announcement of an open data policy for government, much attention has turned towards how exactly data being made available will be used.
Gallant promoted the new policy as a means of fostering new start-up businesses and increasing transparency between government and the province’s citizens.
Ed McGinley, CEO of TechImpact, believes the policy will allow existing companies to take advantage of data being made available and new startups to be established.
“It’s not government’s business to be in business and if there is a value that can be mined out of these data sets and if it’s possible for the government to make it available, then their first reaction is ‘yes we’re going to do it,’” McGinley said. “That’s the way I understand the policy to exist today and I think that that’s very purposeful.”
“The private sector will be looking at it more in terms of how to monetize it. There’s the economic perspective that I see coming. Are we going to see some great big industry come out of this right out of the gate? Probably not. I wouldn’t dismiss the notion that there are opportunities to be found in that data, and there’s going to be a winner.”
McGinley explains that making data available to citizens will allow more control to be put in the hands of the public and help them be more connected and engaged with how their province is being run.
“When I was a kid, you always expected that the government was going to fix everything,” he said. “They were your last line of defence. They had the money, you looked up to them to do things…that’s grown tired. It’s not working anymore. With technology being what it is today, citizens are connected in a way they’ve never been connected before so government doesn’t necessarily fall to the legislators, it falls to the people on the street.”
Ryan Brideau is a masters student studying spatial data visualization and works as a data journalist. Brideau knows the value of open data and believes that while government open data policies are a step in the right direction and a useful tool, they may not necessarily allow new businesses to begin from the ground up.
“I think it’s really good news for journalists, for business analysts, for civil society organizations, any organization that does analysis with data,” he says. “But I don’t necessarily think there is going to be startups or businesses that form as a result of it.”
“The concern I have is that people often hope it will create new businesses or that there will be a plethora of apps that result from it. In reality, the benefits are much more subtle. It’s when you’re a business and you’re looking to locate somewhere, having the data available to make that decision is very useful to you…what we see is businesses and organizations certainly benefiting from the data.”
Brideau points to an example in his own work in which open data was useful. He did an analysis for the state of Arizona where he was looking at which neighbourhoods had improved since the stock market crash of 2008.
“If Arizona hadn’t release the ZIP code data set, I couldn’t have actually broken it down granularly enough to do that. But because they did, I was able to do that analysis and that can help people who do mortgages or realtors make decisions about where to focus their efforts,” he says.
“It’s beneficial from an analyst point of view, but not necessarily from someone looking to start a business around that kind of data.”
Brideau says that the open by default policy is the right choice and that automatically making data that is a public good available, unless there are privacy concerns, is the way it should be done.