Open Data – January 2010 Ideas
The eighteenth idea for my 365 social ideas is a social web principle, but it is not new in any way. It is just another voice in the choir of web enthusiasts screaming for open data. However, most people scream at public institutions all over the world to open up their data for their citizens to play around with. I would however like to extend this plea to corporations as well: if you have data, don’t know what to do with it and are allowed to share it, then please share it. Trust me, you’ll end up the winner in the long run, eventhough you’re giving assets away for free.
I could mention a few companies, that I would know have a lot of information that they aren’t sharing but have no idea what to do with. Or maybe they have thought of some small thing to do with it but miss out on the great huge possibilities it might contain. One such site is Endomondo, a very cool running (or any other moving sport) service for tracking your movement. It will gather information about who’s running where how fast etc – live! And they don’t even use it live – they only use it (currently) for calculating your distance and given you your previously run/driven routes on a map. I know a guy or two, who would love to play around with such live data.
Another example is location-based games like the kind of foursquare or gowalla. I recently read about a larger competitor, who actually currently have more users – namely mytown. But they I checked it out, they have no open API and you cannot use the data you give them for anything else. And I’d rather give my location data to someone, who will allow me to re-use this data in any other fun application, that any other company might think of.
There are many many other examples of public and private institutions as well as small and large corporations, who have gathered really interesting data either directly or through crowd-sourcing, but have kept it to themselves. Please, share it – we will all benefit including yourselves!
Why?
Because even though you might have thousand of employees who might be able to think up great stuff – the millions of developers world-wide can think up even more.
What’s next?
Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.
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Category: API, January 2010 Ideas, Online Rights Comment »