Open Data Offers a World of Potential

Tomorrow marks International Open Data Day, an annual celebration of open data all over the world. As a company that wholeheartedly embraces open-source technology, this is a concept that's near and dear to our hearts. More importantly, it's one that should be near and dear to everyone's because Open Data has the potential to offer immense benefits to all of us.

The purpose of the event is to help people understand the benefits of open data and to encourage adoption of open data policies across a number of disciplines: business and government primarily.

This year, the focus is on four key areas: open research data, tracking public money flows, open data for environment, and open data for human rights.

At Digital Echidna, we're strong supporters of open data for many of the same reasons that we're huge advocates for open-source technology: access to open data makes it easier to create, innovate, iterate, and develop real solutions for today's challenges and help built tomorrow's future.

This event isn't just for developers or policy wonks, though. Open data is an issue that many people at the grassroots level can embrace. From advocacy (reaching out to your elected representatives to state that you're supportive of this concept) to direct, tangible benefits (how open data can be used to improve your life), open data has vast and wide-ranging potential.

Just check out the program with the City of Edmonton's public library: from exploring strategies to improve early learning programs, to using open data to better predict crime, and using open data to analyze car crashes to eventually better design intersections to prevent accidents, the combination of open, accessible data and a mass of people who can use it to develop innovative new solutions is a combination that benefits us all.

That's one of the strengths of the Drupal content management system. While proprietary systems are fine, there's not one that has the sheer volume and dedication of talented developers who are working diligently to test, fix, update, and advance an open-source technology. Open-source inspires innovation and excellence -- as does open data.

London, in particular, is going to be a hub for Open Data. In May, there's a two-day Open Data conference in the Forest City, The Go Open Data Conference (Or GOOD17).

Open concepts, just through scale, allow for better vetting, better acceleration, and better results. And so we invite you to spend a little time over the next couple of days looking at Open Data and how it can benefit you in the long run.