Yesterday, I was at a talk titled: “OpenData, basis for a new political technologies ?” at la Cantine Numérique Rennaise [fr], a place about the digital age located in Rennes. During the debate, I asked how we could assess the impacts of OpenData without some sort of measuring instruments. This is question the EU asked itself in a recent report.
Xavier Crouan, who has been digital innovative and Informations director in Rennes for the past few years and has communicated extensively on OpenData, made a comment that I felt was a misunderstanding of my own question. He roughly stated that it felt typically French to request for tools, indicators whenever risks and innovation were taken. He believed this was saddening to hear French engineers being so grounded and felt innovation should not have to justify itself.
Honestly that wasn’t what I was leading at. The discussion at that point of the debate was about how OpenData would eventually make a difference in people’s life politically as much as economically. In that context, it seemed sensible to ask how we could measure the impacts of OpenData so that we could tweak, tune, improve its usage.
Now in regards to innovation itself, I believe you usually need simple indicators to gauge whether or not you’re walking onto a fruitful path.
For instance, Rennes has held a contest for building applications on data it has recently opened. Xavier Crouan has indicated that 2000 people had voted. One might consider it is an indicator whether or not the contest was publicly a success and if not, how to tune it if there’s another contest next year.
Shooting in different directions in hope one path will lead to strong innovation is shortsighted in my book. You need to define a few criteria that will assess how each direction fares. This is what OpenData promotes too: improving efficiency in reusing of public sector data.
Innovation is not incompatible with retrospective.
