Monday, June 8, 2015 the problem with open data is open data people
For comms people the message 'look at the data' is important to shape what you do, what you say and who you say it to. The open data movement and communications people should be best friends. The trouble is, they are not. Is it time they told their story better?
by Dan Slee
There is a movement that many people haven’t heard of that in theory has the power to re-shape the world you live in.
It can expose fraud, save lives and give new insight into the London blitz.
The movement is for open data. That’s the publishing of all public information.
So, that’s everything from the location of public toilets or grit bins to what suppliers a council buys toilet roll from.
Once the data is published in a format that computers can read – csv files on a spreadsheet should do it – the information can start to throw-up trends and spikes unseen by the human eye. Tim Berners-Lee gave an excellent TED talk on the subject which you can see here.
There’s a significant role it can play in creating insight that can shape communications decisions.
But the single biggest obstacle to all this is that open data people are bad – no, stratospherically bad - at communicating with non-geeks.
I’ll give you an example.
In Birmingham, there’s an informal event called Brewcamp which sees people come together at a café after hours to hear three speakers. There’s room for discussion afterwards.
A year or so back, with the coffee bought we sat down for the first speaker. This was on an aspect of open data which more than half the audience had come for. It was a pretty technical discussion of SPARQL queries and universal formats that left the converted animated and unconverted in the dark.
“Could I just say,” one baffled audience member said to the geeks at the end, “that you lot are really, really scary and I diidn’t understand a word that anyone said.”
And then hack days. That’s the process where mainly coders gather round to put their heads together to try and solve a problem by building a website or an app. Largely as a prototype. At best, this creates new ideas and approaches. At worst, it’s geeks showboating to other geeks.
I’m not remotely open data expert. I get the broad principles. I even helped the council who I was working for pioneer publishing every line of spend over £500. And no, bloggers did not act as an army armchair of auditors. I also co-founded a long defunct blog to try and share examples of where open data made a difference to tell the story. I gave up.
But the excellent BlueLightCamp event in Birmingham reminded me of the problem that the open data community have of speaking outside the coding ghetto. The people I met were all fine, passionate people. But they voiced day-to-day frustration in dealing with non-coders. Rewired State and Young Rewired State do good work in the field. And I like the look of Mark Braggins' Open Data Aha! blog.
Nothing changes overnight.
But until enough open data geeks speak human then open data will not realise its potential.
Here’s how: tell them what the problem you faced was. Not the code problem but the actual real world problem. Then tell them what the thing was that cracked it. Then mention there’s a bit of open data under the bonnet that helped that.
The story needs to be told again and again. Not as a csv file. But in plain English.
Dan Slee is co-creator of comms2point0.
Reader Comments (9)
I agree and think this is a problem in tech in general but focusing on open data, it doesn't have the cachet of big data. With big data, you barely need to sell the concept because the real-life results are clear and provide real value. With open data, you're already battling a number of myths and legends, so persuading people outside the open data community it is useful *to them* is an uphill battle.
I'm struck by the differences between this article and one on LinkedIn about the same event. That author decided if people don't "get it", you should leave them behind and focus on those that do. I'm in the camp of, if people don't "get it", maybe you're explaining "it" wrong? as a first stab at persuasion, all things being equal.
The Open Data Institute's slogan is "Knowledge for everyone" - only possible if we don’t keep it to ourselves.
You are so right Dan. As someone from a comms background that has worked with developers to produce meaningful outputs from open data - see our Birmingham housing data tool at http://www.birminghamhousingdata.org/ - I'm regularly tearing my hair out over this. I'm hoping the video we've just made that describes Bath and NE Somerset's approach is accessible to people who are not impressed or engaged by geek-speak. See http://www.theinformationdaily.com/2015/06/05/bathhacked-gets-citizens-delivering-open-data-value
I totally get this. But I also totally get the geekery. I feel like a hydra. So I'm wondering if the issue here is really one of conflation of purpose and expectation management...
Open data technical folks will undoubtedly find utility in having a get together to geek out with each other over data standards, different approaches, new visualisation tools and the like. And more power to their technical elbows. As a bear with a very small brain for this stuff, I'm really none the wiser as to exactly what they're doing, but remain totally in awe. But on the basis they're getting something out of it, then geek-on.
Communicators can tell ace stories, when there's some insight arising from the open-data-technical-geekery. And my hunch is that being a *good* communicator is as much a skill as being a great technical bod. But because we're all communicators of sorts, its easy to take it for granted. Its hard to be a good communicator. And for some technical folks, its hard to be a communicator at all.
When the technical geeks and the communicators get together, some magic can happen. It takes some patience and understanding from both crews to get and value each other, and each others contribution to the magic. And if you find yourself in the company of the rare beast the polymath who can do both, quick, whack a geo-tagging device on them - they're a rare and valuable friend to have.
My hunch is there's a problem when there's a mis-match of expectations around whether an event, hangout or blog is for "doing technical stuff" (in which case, expect fluent 0s and 1s to be spoken) or for "enthusing people to get involved with open data" (expect some of the 0s and 1s and some story-telling) or showing people what can be achieved with open data (storytelling, but no 0s and 1s).
Great stuff Super Dan. This isn't an issue just restricted to Comms people though. Anyone outside of the Geek Circle of Trust who could use that data or Experian Mosaic Data or other data that could influence Strategic decision making within the organisation have the same issue.
What's required is a Human API that can connect the two. Adur & Worthing have got one in the form of Dave Briggs IMHO.
We probably did communicate this well enough - but we've been helping a few community groups start using data and open data better and have shared our practical how to's here:
http://bevocal.org.uk/
We're not at the ambitious end of linked data - but we hope that by helping people a little and sharing exactly what they are doing we will advance thi
http://www.socialmediasurgery.com/ngs gradually, much like how we started helping people with the social media surgeries.
I agree with your overall point but think your headline is a bit harsh, there's almost no professional sphere that doesn't have its fair share of incomprehensible jargon; that's what communications people are for. It's just more obvious when it's a different language that you're effectively speaking in. i've always found the coders who have participated in things like hackdays to be super-willing to answer my simple questions and i wouldn"t take offence because they're not automatically translating for me, especially if the majority if the audience are natives, so to speak, just as i wouldn't expect a group speaking German to switch to English just because I was there. The great thing about those events is that you get to immerse yourself in language that you don't understand and get clues about what's possible, then ask stupid questions. The showcases tend to be where all the jargon comes together into something useful. So the argument that all those apps don't get developed into something further kind of misses the point - the showcase is the explanation or story of what can be done with data.
There is also another fundamental problem in that community – they often don't practice what they preach. If they want others to be open, they would do very well to lead by example.
For example, we looked at 34 open data advocates, and found that many were far from open on their own affairs. For more, take a look here:
http://www.transparify.org/blog/2015/5/27/iodc-2015-do-transparency-advocacy-groups-practice-what-they-preach
Both sides have to make an effort.
The data geeks could be less geeky and the non-geeks could become more geeky. The non-geeks need to make a minimum level of investment in understanding the technology and the language. The geeks need to make a minimum level of investment in learning how to translate technical stuff into plain English Language.
On balance I suspect the non geeks need to put in more effort. The world is technology driven and understanding the basic elements of science and technology would actually enhance the sense of wonder.
I help run the open data service for the University of Southampton. One rule we try to stick to is never to publish data without a human readable interface, even if it's just a webpage showing the list and a page per record. It's easy to do, helps catch dumb mistakes in the data, and increases the value of the data massively for very little additional investment. The most impressive impacts we've had are from people working with the raw data, but there is a long tail of people who just got one useful fact. Another rule we try to follow is to tell people the process for correcting errors at the page they see the error on, not burried. Our best example of this is http://equipment.data.ac.uk/ which would be a disaster if people reported issues to the webmaster as the data comes from 40+ sources. If you search for a record, the resulting page tells you who to contact if it's wrong.
Also, you are looking at open data from the perspective of transparency and statistics, which is important, but not the end of the story. Straight facts are more useful for day to day humans. It's the difference between "where's the best place to get coffee in Clapham?" and "where can I get a coffee while changing trains?"