[open-sustainability] Can open data make a more sustainable world?

Tue Jun 10 15:18:19 UTC 2014

New blog post from Alex Romaniuc, who had the pleasure of discussing open sustainability with recently in Amsterdam.

http://greenbyblue.com/open-data/

Can Open Data make a more sustainable world?

Posted on June 5, 2014 by admin at greenbyblue.com
Berlin is a place where you feel the weight of history. It’s destruction during the Second World War and its subsequent division is still not completely healed. Reminders of a time when walls kept people in and ideas out can still be found.

Perhaps because of its history, today’s Berlin hosts a number of initiatives that champion openness, transparency, and sustainability including the Open Knowledge Foundation, Transparency International, and the newly established Cleanweb Berlin

We had the pleasure of sharing a few good Kreuzberger Molle beers and some hearty German food in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district with a few German and British techies and activists. They see the opening of data as a key to transparency and sustainability.

Open data and open government

What is open data? According to the Open Data Handbook [http://opendatahandbook.org/en/] it is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share alike.

One section of the Handbook that really interested us was the benefits that open government data could have on democracy, such as improving transparency and democratic control, participation, efficiency, and effectiveness of government service and measurement of policies.

With Alex having worked on democracy and governance projects for over a decade the prospect of change that open data brings is an exciting one for us.

The scale and depth of change that open data can bring could, in fact, be enormous. It could act as a powerful jolt to citizens and politicians in established and developing democracies alike. Open data could bring about a more inclusive and participatory democracy, one that stimulates more people to be active locally and globally.

Open Sustainability

Open data can stimulate change in another significant area as well, that of sustainability. Sustainability is an exceptionally difficult challenge. The required transition to sustainability is of such a magnitude that it requires a truly global effort. As Jack Townsend puts  it in his paper on open sustainability:

It will require society to collaborate, to create new knowledge together and new ways of doing things; we do not have the time to fight each other over copyright. We need open data about the state of the planet, we need transparency about emissions and the impact of products and industries, we need feedback and we need accountability.

The more informed we are, the more efficiently we will use our resources. The more data we have, the more efficient, effective and innovative our solutions will become; and the more open data we have, the more effective people will be in advocating for government action on sustainability.

Examples are already out there. Cleanweb companies are right now using open data to make transport, energy and other services more efficient and use fewer resources.

You can ready more about open data in the Open Book, a collection of articles from the first Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki in 2012. The Open Knowledge Festival will be in Berlin on 5-17 July. We wish we could be there. But we’ll be many thousands of kilometers away…

Thanks to everyone we met in Berlin at the Wirtshaus Max und Moritz. Thanks also to Jack Townsend for an inspiring chat about open data and open sustainability on a sunny spring day in Amsterdam.

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