Web 2.0 for juandoming

Will the open data movement be a force for community-led democratisation or for a new wave of algorithm-driven corporate giants? There are worrying signs of the latter.

A recent white paper from CapGemini on unlocking economic value by opening up government and public data highlights Silicon Valley real-estate advertising company Zillow to show the economic benefits of open data. Built on open tax data, county records and home-for-sale listings, Zillow launched a free service last October, listing homes going through the foreclosure process – and also potentially exposing the owners' financial troubles to neighbours and employers. Is this reckless profiteering the democratisation we are looking for?

There is no doubt that more government data can usefully come out from Whitehall and local town halls, but we should not to be swept away by the appealing language of openness.

There is room for a number of models when providing access, including non-commercial licences, closed partnerships between cities and citizen groups, and the use of non-standard formats for sharing that reflect the quirks of individual cities. Each of these breaks the idea of "openness" in one way or another, but we should be prepared to do so.

Openness itself is not a virtue, and it's time the debate moved beyond it.

Linked Open Data (data placed in context by interconnecting several sources, data interlinked so to become more useful) and Open Data (raw data from research, census, public data, etc.): one word makes all the difference.