Open Data has the potential to improve public transportation, urban planning, education, government procurement, and many other areas. Steven Adler explains what other applications will Open Data bring in the near future and how it could disrupt all of our notions of traditional government and business roles in society. Steve Adler has been a leader in data management and innovation for over 20 years. He invented the fields of Data Governance, Enterprise Privacy Architectures, and Internet Insurance. He serves currently as the Chief Data Officer of the City of Medellin, Colombia, and created The Data Cooking Show in Lima to teach data to Peruvian journalists. He is a member of the US Department of Commerce Data Advisory Council, and founder of the Africa Open Data Group. In 2014, he led an international team to collect and publish Open Data to assist West African nations struggling to fight the Ebola outbreak. In creating "Ebola Open Data Repository" the team invented a new category of Open Data called People Data - data collected and published by people without support from governments, corporations, or other institutions.
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This morning I want to talk to you about people data, not big data and not data about individual
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people and their private lives, but rather data that people can collect and share with
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other people to make a difference in the world.
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But to tell you this story, I need to take you on a journey that I started about a year
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ago when I hosted an event in Washington, D.C. called the Africa Open Data Jam.
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This event was hosted as part of a large conference that the White House put on called the U.S.
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African Leadership Summit, in which they invited 30 or more African heads of state to Washington
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to meet with the president and other dignitaries and talk about how to improve relationships
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between the United States and Africa.
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and one of the issues on the agenda was open government and open data.
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What is open data?
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Open data is when an organization like a government or a corporation
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publishes data on the web, in a database, outside the firewall,
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for anyone to use, download onto their home computer,
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computer, for any purpose, without restriction and without permission.
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This is a really radical idea because for the last 20 years, large organizations and
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small have been publishing information on the internet with copyright licenses that
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told us what we could do with the information when we read it, whether we could use it again,
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whether we could share it again.
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But now, all of a sudden, for the last few years, organizations are no longer publishing
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publishing data with copyrights, they're giving it to us
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in downloadable files that we can use however we want.
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This movement began in 2005
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with a program started by the World Bank
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called the Transparent Aid Initiative .
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The idea behind the Transparent Aid Initiative was that if countries that donated
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money in foreign aid would publish information
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about the money they gave and where it went and if countries that received this
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aid would also publish information about how they spent it, we could improve the
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efficiency of international economic development and reduce corruption.
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Now, turns out we did improve the efficiency of information communication. We didn't
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do that much about corruption. Turns out that corrupt people are really smart and
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And, by the way, they don't publish their activities in open data repositories.
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Nevertheless, this initiative caught the attention of a freshman senator from Illinois
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who in 2006 brought a new bill to the United States Senate
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to create an open government movement in the United States.
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His bill didn't get enough sponsors and it didn't succeed.
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But when Barack Obama was elected president,
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in 2008, he turned to his campaign staff and said I would like my administration to be
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the most open government in American history.
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I would like us to give the American people information that we collect from them about
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what they do that we use by default.
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Without them sending us Freedom of Information Act requests and waiting online to get the
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the data that we've been holding for hundreds of years
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and maybe someday want to give them
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if they ask pretty please nicely.
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And so he, his campaign staff found some technologists
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who set up a database called data.gov.
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Data.gov today has over 160,000 data sets
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across every part of the American government.
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And it has been copied by nations and cities
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these all across the world, in North and South America, in Asia, in Europe, and in Africa.
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And that's actually why I wanted to host an African Open Data Jam as part of this leadership
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summit, to help African countries build more effective open data programs and to harness
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the power of information to transform their economies and the lives of their peoples.
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So, we had about 120 people join us on August 5th, 2014,
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where we had lots of cool lightning talks about different subjects on open data.
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And in the midst of this conference, at 1 o'clock, in the middle of lunch,
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20 of our participants from Sierra Leone had their phones ring.
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All at once. Like, not separated, all at once.
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You know, like an automated message coming from somebody.
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And they received notification from British Airways
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that their flights back to Freetown
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had been cancelled due to Ebola.
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I don't know if you have any direct experience
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with international crises like hurricanes or tornadoes or diseases.
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A lot of us watch that stuff on TV, and it's really abstract.
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And of course it's tragic, but we really can't relate to it personally.
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But at that moment in the room,
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there were 20 people who really didn't expect that Ebola would ever affect them
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personally, but they were directly impacted. They had family in Freetown
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that they weren't gonna see, and some of these people couldn't go home for months
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because of this outbreak. And we all knew in the room that we couldn't just leave
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them hanging, that we had to drop everything and see what we could do with
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the technologies and the data and the ideas and the imagination of the group
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to focus on how we could help West Africa deal with this Ebola crisis.
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Now, at this moment, I didn't know anything about Sierra Leone.
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I wasn't really quite sure where it was on the map.
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I knew it was in West Africa, but exactly where, I wasn't sure.
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I didn't know anything about Ebola, but I knew we had to help.
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And so we began brainstorming, what could we do to help them?
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And we organized a meet-up group, which now has hundreds of people,
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And we began having conversations every week, working with international aid organizations
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on what could we do to help.
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And we had a team from our research lab that immediately put together a proposal to do
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some social sentiment analysis to identify how people were feeling about Ebola in Sierra
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Leone.
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We worked with the government for weeks.
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and the idea was is that during a crisis the government is the authoritative
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voice of information and warning to the public and they use radio and TV to
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communicate these ideas and messages to the public but often they don't fully
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understand how these messages affect the people there's no real feedback loop to
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to the government about how the messages are being read.
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So for example, early in the crisis,
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the president of Sierra Leone told his people
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that Ebola was an enemy of the state.
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Now this is a really horrible thing to tell people
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because you're basically saying,
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if you've got Ebola, we're gonna shoot you.
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So don't come telling us you've got Ebola
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because we don't wanna hear it.
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and so we set up call centers and told the government that if they're going to give
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messages to the public to let the let the public tell them what they feel about those messages and
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what they think about ebola and what their concerns are and what their what information
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they need we set up this call center to take messages from the public in seven different
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languages we transcribed it into english text we sent the text to a computer a big data analytics
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computer in Nairobi, where we analyzed the messages for social sentiment, for
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emotions. We put that into a heat map to tell the government how their messages
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were affecting the population and how they should change their messages to be
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more effective. And it really was a great solution. Unfortunately, it didn't go into
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Sierra Leone until late October, and we weren't really convinced that that was
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going to be enough to help stem the tide of the outbreak. So we began working on
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other solutions. And one of my colleagues said, what about using open data to collect information
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about Ebola and share it with everybody who's working on the disease? And so we asked people
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who are working on international aid, hey, would you mind if we set up a repository to do that,
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to collect information from the United Nations, from WHO, from universities, from all over the
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world and put it into one repository where everybody could share it? And people said,
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said, that's a great idea. Please go do that. So we organized an Ebola open data jam in New York City
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on October 18th, where we brought together about 120 volunteers who gave a Saturday to work
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together to scour the internet to identify all available public sources of information about
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Ebola and put it in one place. But we ran into one problem. Our lawyers told us that the data
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we might collect could have copyrights and we could inadvertently violate
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copyright and be sued and so they told us that we could not host this data on a
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government or corporate website now we had already announced the event and we
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didn't want to cancel it so we thought what could we do so we decided to set up
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our own open data repository we registered a domain name called Ebola
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boladata.org, and we set up our own open data database, unaffiliated with any government or
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corporation. And in doing so, we invented a new category of data, people data, because we were
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just volunteers, just ordinary people working together to try to make a difference in the world
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by collecting information that other people lacked, and by giving it to them could make a
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difference in what they knew about the world and how they could change it.
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As we collected this information, we began to realize that there was a lot of data that
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we wanted that was missing.
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Really important data.
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Data about the healthcare capacity of the countries that were affected by Ebola and
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what they were doing to deal with it.
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You know, we saw lots of videos on TV about patients who were driving around desperate
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to find beds in hospitals that could treat them.
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Their family would drive them around the countryside looking for empty beds and no one had any
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empty beds to treat these people.
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And furthermore, the hospitals didn't have any communication systems to tell them, oh,
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we don't have a bed, maybe you can find it someplace else.
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So we asked the governments, you know, are there any databases that list all the hospitals
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in your country?
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They didn't have it or it took weeks to produce.
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We eventually found lists of all the health care facilities in all the countries,
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but these lists were generated by eight organizations,
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World Bank, WHO, United Nations,
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and they had inconsistent information.
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Nothing was accurate. It was all out of date.
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And furthermore, the data didn't have anything really meaningful in it.
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It couldn't tell you the GPS coordinates of the hospital.
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It didn't tell you how old the hospital was,
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how many doctors and nurses, what their qualifications were,
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if they had any equipment, and if the equipment worked.
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because a lot of medical equipment in developing countries don't work.
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We wanted to know if the hospital had electricity,
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if it had internet connections and cell phone communication.
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We wanted to know the basic capacity of these hospitals
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to deal with a critical crisis, and it was missing.
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And realizing that it was missing,
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we realized that all the aid organizations who were rushing to give aid
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didn't know what problems they were fixing.
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And this was really apparent in Liberia.
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You know, when the crisis began,
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the president of Liberia, Sir Leif Johnson,
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came to the United States and begged the Obama administration to send aid.
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And of course, we Americans, we like to send aid.
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And we send aid in a specific way.
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We send Marines.
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We send a few thousand Marines to Monrovia,
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not to take over the country,
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just to build Ebola treatment units,
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which are these sort of plastic enclosed beds
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that isolate a patient from other patients
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while they can get liquids to recover.
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We built 3,000 Ebola treatment units in Monrovia
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over the course of six to eight months.
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Do you know how many patients we treated after we built these units?
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28.
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It was several billion dollars that we spent
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sending the Marines over there to build these units.
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And the reason we only were able to treat 28 patients
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was that by the time they got deployed
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and the material got sent over
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and they built the units, the Liberian government had contained the virus with
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the existing health infrastructure they had and the governance that they
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improved by responding to the crisis. And we didn't know that because we didn't
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have any information about the capacity they had or any updates on how they
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improved their governance. And that's a really important lesson in a crisis. If
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you don't know what's working, it's hard to know what to fix. And so we organized
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We organized another Ebola open data jam,
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this time in four locations around the world,
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in New York, in Washington, D.C., in London, and in Kampala.
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We had over 800 volunteers working together
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to identify, first, building a data model
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to help document the capacity of healthcare in these countries,
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and secondly, to collect data from people who lived there
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and from people who lived abroad,
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who were residents of the state, part of the diaspora community,
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to document the information that they had in their heads
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from their own experiences about the hospitals they knew
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in the areas that they grew up in.
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That is, we were collecting people data
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about the world in which these people lived
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to share with the rest of the world to improve things.
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And eventually, we identified hundreds of healthcare facilities
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that were not on the map from any other area.
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And you know, that's really a shame, because today,
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Today, all of us use maps to find this location,
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to figure out where the best coffee shops are,
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gas stations, to go on vacation, to plan trips.
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But we don't have maps that show us
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where critical infrastructure is in our societies.
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We can't find really high-quality information
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about the best schools, about hospitals,
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about social services that work and what they cost
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and the outcomes they deliver.
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And this, to me, is the most important information of all because it's what helps us lead meaningful and productive lives.
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And that's something that we worked on with this open data, this Ebola open data jam.
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And it's why I say to people, you know, you hear vendors often say that we're drowning in data and we have too much of it.
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I tell people that's not true.
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We don't have nearly enough data about the things that really matter in this world.
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And as we move forward, we have to collect a lot more information
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about our world and our communities.
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And the best way to do that is not to wait for government to collect it
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and give it to you when they're ready.
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The best way to collect information is for you to do it yourselves.
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And you can do it yourselves.
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Look, a year ago, I didn't know anything about African open data, about Sierra Leone or Ebola.
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I was just a guy who discovered he could make a difference with data.
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I saw some people in front of me who were personally affected by a crisis, and I felt
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I had to act.
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I'm not a politician.
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I'm not a scientist.
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scientist, I'm not a doctor. But I discovered I could make a difference. And that means
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that all of you can do the same. Today with cloud computing, it's cheap and easy to build
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open databases for people data. And any of you in the audience can do what I did. And
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I urge you all to please take advantage of people data to empower yourselves and your
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communities to make a difference in the world. Thank you.
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