 Hello, everyone. My name is Joel Gurren, and I'm the president and founder of the Center for Open Data Enterprise. We are a Washington-based nonprofit that works to maximize the value of open data as a public resource. And I would like to welcome you to today's just-goo program on building businesses on open government data. So today, my colleague Jed Sunwall and I will be very happy to field and answer your questions on this interesting subject. Jed leads the Global Open Data Program at Amazon Web Services, AWS, which explores ways for the AWS cloud to make data easier to discover, access, and use. Welcome to our program. So for those of you watching online, you can join our discussion by sending us your questions and comments through the chat roll on the right side of your screen, or through Twitter at hashtag Just Guru. Now, one more time, that hashtag is G-I-S-T-G-U-R-U. That's one word. Hashtag Just Guru. We'll be watching for your questions there. So while we wait for some questions to come in, Jed, good morning. Good to see you again. Let's start off by describing exactly what open government data means to us. Jed, why don't you go first and talk a little bit about how you see this resource, and then I'll chime in too. Sure. So governments, as we know, produce a lot of data. And in many parts of the world, the data that governments produce is required to be open. Increasingly, there are policies being passed at all levels of government that require governments to open up data and make it available to people. Now, a lot of that data is made available for regulatory reasons. It's data that journalists want, or that watchdog groups might want, or other types of regulators might want to be able to see, to be able to evaluate how effectively the government is doing its job. But actually, what I focus on is a lot of government-sponsored data are government-produced data that's useful to the scientific community. So there are many government organizations that produce weather data. They have sensors installed to create and gather weather data. And there are also many government programs all around the world that fund research to do research on the environment or in biology and life sciences and other areas of interest, economic research as well. And that research often also produces data that is required to be shared publicly. So when I talk about open data, I tend to talk about data that's produced by the government, but also sometimes data that's produced by government-funded projects. Yeah, great. And our organization, I think, would see open government data very much the same way. I think a couple of thoughts on it are that, I mean, what AWS has done has been to take on really some of the most useful and most difficult and largest data sets that we have, which are tremendously valuable as a public resource. What we see, and I should say our organization works both a lot with the U.S. federal government and with governments around the world. We've done work with the World Bank. We've done work with individual governments in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South America. So pretty much everywhere, Australia and New Zealand as well. But what we're finding is that open government data can either be these very large data sets, or it can be in some cases much smaller data, or more manageable data, like, for example, registries of corporations, or data about a particular demographics in a particular geographical area that may not be as huge and complex a data set, but that can still be extremely valuable. And what we're very interested in, I would say, well, I would say there are two kind of classic uses for open government data, and we tend to focus more on the second. The first is open data for transparency and accountability. And a lot of the open data movement really started maybe about 10 years ago with a focus on governments releasing data that is really important for citizens to be able to know how the government spending taxpayers money, how the government is operating. And we're still seeing that as a very, very important agenda both in the U.S. and abroad. But we also are very interested in the application of open government data as a resource. So what can companies do with weather data, with demographic data, with data about healthcare and on and on. And I think that's mostly what we'll be talking about today. So having sort of set the stage, so, Jed, I'm going to ask you the first question. And then I'll add some thoughts. But what do you think of, when you think of companies that excel at using open government data to help build their business, what do you see as some examples, either specific companies or some types of companies and types of business that you've seen as really good examples of this kind of application? Sure. So I think one really interesting example is Airbnb. So Airbnb, you know, they basically had this revelation, this idea that there's a lot of remnant inventory in terms of places you can sleep in the world. And that they merely needed to connect people with that information. Most, you know, the real secret sauce to I think Airbnb's data is that they've gotten all sorts of people who actually have, you know, rooms to sleep in to trust them to list those online and put a price on them. But Airbnb is actually able to determine for what markets to enter into, what cities and neighborhoods to focus on based on census data that's produced by the US government. So I think one thing that, one thing I've learned over the years working with a lot of different governments is that we're really, we're quite spoiled in the United States because of the Census Bureau. They do really remarkable work and produce very high valuable, you know, quality data, and it's like fully open. So Airbnb is able to use census data to really determine like where to focus its business efforts. You know, not only like among cities, but also within cities and in certain neighborhoods and things like that, which I, you know, I've been pretty impressed with and they've certainly grown a very quick and large and successful business doing that. That's, that's a great example and that's, I think it's so interesting because Airbnb of course combines the data that they collect from all the people who either offer their places or want to stay in those places. But as you just said, the ability to use that kind of government data just tremendously maximizes and helps them optimize their business. We see when we look at businesses around the world, I think also two patterns. One is very much like what you just described, businesses that can use open data to do their business better. In other words, they would still have a business if they didn't get any open government data, but they can have a much better business with it. So we're seeing examples for, for instance, a lot of major retailers are using really sophisticated models now that include all kinds of things that affect their supply chain. It might be how weather patterns or different kinds of shipping patterns can affect how they get what they need and when they want to have certain kinds of items in stock and so on based on what they've discovered from analyzing data about buying patterns that are affected by these other variables. We're also seeing a lot of startups using open data in some creative ways and I think one really interesting example is what's happening around agriculture and you can see sort of the range of applications. So one end of the spectrum is the US company called the Climate Corporation, which has become a major example of a very, very successful open data business. They were sold to Monsanto a couple years ago for around a billion dollars and they've developed very, very sophisticated ways of using satellite and other data for what they're calling precision agriculture, right? So it's essentially figuring out how to give farmers and large agribusiness really sophisticated information about how to plant their crops, what crops and what cycle based on all the stuff that they can get from Earth observation. On the other hand, you have companies like M Farm in Kenya or Farmer Line in Ghana that are delivering just more sort of bottom line information for farmers in those countries that they don't need to do it by laptop. They can do it by cell phone, but at that level as well that information can be very, very helpful in similar ways. So we're seeing a wide range of different kinds of applications from entrepreneurs at the billion dollar end of the spectrum and the more modest end of the spectrum, but developing innovative approaches that are really useful for whatever country they're in and appropriate to that country. So lots to talk about today. We have some questions coming in from online and we're going to start with one that I think just builds a little bit from what we were just saying and I think is worth exploring some more. And Jen, I'll ask you to start on this too as well. So this is a question from Twitter from at the culture who asked what exactly does open government data mean and specifically if you talk more about is this data produced by the government or by government funded projects. And Jed, I think you just touched on that briefly, but if you want to talk about that a bit more because I think that's a really important point to clarify. Yeah, no, it is important. So I think it's worth, it's probably worth getting a little bit into semantics here. You know, when we talk about open data broadly, we were just talking about any kind of data that's free for use, reuse and redistribution without any license restrictions. So it's generally what what I'm talking about when I talk about open data. Then, when you talk about government data, really on the surface, you should be talking about data that is produced by the government says produced by a government agency, some sort of government body, and then it's made open as open data. So that would be open government data. There is a bit of overlap in this Venn diagram, it can be kind of hard to determine where, where the government ends and where researchers begin. But then you also have government funded programs or government funded research in the United States that's, you know, potentially funded by the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. They fund all sorts of research. Increasingly, the research funded by those government bodies, those grant makers, is required to be open. Now, whether that resulting data is government data or not, we can probably spend the rest of our webinars debating that I'm not really sure what the answer is or if it's really super useful. But I guess, you know, just to clarify things, when we talk about government data, perhaps we should, you know, just be a little bit clearer that when we're talking about government data, we're usually talking about data that is produced by a government entity, and then they've been required to disclose. Great. Yeah, I'd like to actually, I have a question for you to follow up on that a little bit too so so we've been doing a lot of work on both government data and government funded data and as you mentioned earlier this is really coming up a lot in the scientific research community. And there's more and more of a sense that if research is funded by a government and it could be the United States government, it could be the European Union, it could be a national government in another country. More and more of a sense that since it's publicly funded, that data should be made available for all researchers to use. So it's not just you want to have access to the final published article, you ought to have access to the actual data set. And at the same time, though, it's very difficult for a lot of researchers because the incentives for them have all been about, you know, if I publish this data, I ought to be able to use it first. And this is something that affects not only the scientific research community, but ultimately affects the business community because there are a lot of businesses out there that are scientifically based that would like to use that data as well. Do you see that as kind of a developing international movement to try to open that data? And, you know, what do you think might be some of the next steps there? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, I think where a lot of this is coming from is just from advances in technology that have really reached consumers and taught consumers to understand that, you know, sharing several megabytes or even gigabytes of data really isn't that hard or expensive. It's become somewhat trivial in many parts of the world because of internet access and just the general declining cost of technology. And so previously where if you were doing research and you're producing, let's, you know, say hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of data, you could, you know, very presumably and credulously just say, like, yeah, this is my data. I'm going to hold it and it's going to be on the zip drive in my desk or something like that, because that was really the only way to use this to store and transmit data of that sort of volume. And is that the roads in people's minds? It's becoming more evident that, you know, there's really no reason to lock that up. There's no that sort of physical technical reason why data should be hard to get. And so everybody's bias is becoming, well, data should be easy to get. And if we're paying for this with with tax dollars or public funds, it should be made more broadly available. The problem is, of course, that the policy environment that we have to support research comes from that same era when data was sort of hard to move around. And I just don't think it's caught up. I do the point now where people, you know, reasonably expect to be able to access and share gigabytes of data. But the policy framework doesn't just really support that yet. And it's a, it's a problem that we're going to get through, but it's a serious problem that affects sharing of data and research data all over the world. So I think, I think for people who have an interest in using the data, a lot of it is just to sort of make your voices heard and and see if there are ways. We've seen a number of cases recently, I think where data has been opened up in response to some real desire by the business community or by by NGOs to have access to it. And I think that that can be helpful. And that actually leads us right into our next question. A viewer is asking, and this takes us from like, you know, the huge, huge kinds of data sets that AWS works with that we've just been talking about to the other end of the spectrum. So a viewer is asking, it's often difficult to convince municipalities to open data for innovation. Are you aware of an effective strategy we can take to get more buy in from the government to open data. So, so let me talk about this one a little bit and then Jed, please, please add your thoughts. So we have a phrase here in the US, where people often refer to the very difficult to cure problem known as data hugging disorder, where a number of agencies and data providers tend to go like this when you ask them to release their data. And I think it is a normal human responsible one that we're all trying to get over. And, you know, certainly you can see that at a municipal level or at a government level. So one of the things that our organization has been doing. I want to talk about just for a minute is we are finding that tapping into the business community and really developing the use case for data can be the most persuasive way to to cure data hugging disorder and to communicate to national governments as well as city, state, provincial, local governments, that their data really has a use and that if it is released, people are going to find ways to really get value from it. Our group has developed something called the open data for business tool, or OD4B tool that we've developed in partnership with the World Bank. It is an open source tool that the World Bank is now using all over the world that others can use. And we also work with national governments in particular, although I think this could be applied to the city level as well. To to apply this as a way of demonstrating and developing the business case for open data use and what this tool does is it's a way of going in talking to the business community, seeing what kinds of open data they are already using seeing and then making that case to the government and we're seeing a lot of responsiveness. I mean, you're seeing this in terms of issues like corporate registries, health related data, economic data that once government agencies or ministries begin to hear the business case, they become much more interested in releasing the data because they know there will be a purpose to doing that and they know that they can help build the, fill the needs of the business community. So that's that's something that we've found potentially very, very effective and Jed, you know, would love to have your thoughts on that too. Yeah, I mean, it is tricky working at municipal level, because all, you know, municipalities are all different. So if you find something that works in one city, it might not work in the other city. But I think a general rule of thumb, I agree 100% with you Joel, if every city, and one thing I do know about every city is they want their economies to thrive and grow. And so if you can find any sort of demand from the local business community for data assets that the city might have and, you know, make a make a clear case to the city that their business community would once this data and would benefit from it would be happier if they had better access to it, then then you'll start gaining traction. But the important thing I think to remember here is that, you know, we talked before we mentioned before like a lot of open data discussion has its roots in transparency and an oversight by wash our groups and things like that. Unfortunately, I'm just going to call it like it is that those conversations don't usually don't go very far, right, especially when you're talking to cities that, you know, usually have pretty tight budgets. If you go in and say, hey, we really want you to open up your data, because we want to see how bad of a job you're doing everything we can make your lives harder. So what they hear is you're asking me to do more work so that you can make my life harder. You know, as a result, so usually those conversations don't go very far. So if you can find some sort of traction, where you can say hey listen, your constituents would benefit would benefit from this, they would like you more because of this, you're going to, you're going to get the conversation going. And then hopefully that'll lead to a more sort of open by default environment, which will eventually lead to more oversight. You know, I don't I want to be clear like I'm definitely pro transparency. That's that's definitely a good thing in my mind that you do have to be careful about how you start the conversation. Then one other thing I would just say is that, you know, think about if you can when you're working with government agencies their own business operations and their own costs. I had a great conversation with the district attorney in San Diego and San Diego County. I learned that they get public records requests, you know, free to move information act request for, for, for records and documents and things like that. When they get those requests, they have attorneys fulfill them. So they actually have, you know, pretty high paid staff have to take time out of their day and off of important case work to respond to those requests. And that opened the door for a really good open data conversation. So well, you can put those records online and make them available through some sort of online portal or service and save yourself a lot of staff time. And that was a good conversation to get things going. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's a great example. And I think, you know, transparency is a tricky thing. But, you know, there is a, there's another, there's a positive benefit to transparency in addition to the social good, which is, I think in many countries, demonstrating more transparency, demonstrating sort of more of an open book around government operations, government funding, finance, and so on, can actually be a way of improving the climate for foreign investments. So we've talked a lot about the value of transparency. It's in a sense, doing well by doing good, that it's not only the right thing to do, but it actually can be a very smart move in terms of developing the climate that makes it easier for to attract investment and grow national businesses. So we have two questions now in a row that are kind of bookends. One is, what are common business models for new data driven companies? And the second is, how can existing businesses, existing businesses benefit from open data? So, why don't we each talk about both of those? I'm going to start, I think a little bit, if I may, on the new new data driven companies, then turn it over to you, Jen, and then Jed, if you want to talk about existing businesses, and I'll, I'll pick up from there. So, the new data driven companies, I mean, this is very interesting. One of the other things that we've done at our center is we've developed a tool called the open data impact map, which if you simply search the words open data impact map, you can find it and we're always very eager for any kind of feedback or comments that people have on it. What we've set out to do is to do a world map in a searchable sort of a database of as many examples of organizations and businesses using open data, as we can find we now have more than 1700 use cases and it's still growing. So, when we look at the businesses that are using open data around the world, we find that about roughly half are small and medium enterprises and roughly half launched in the last five years. So, there's definitely a lot of startup activity around open data. And what we're seeing is that companies are using a range of different business models sometimes in combination. I can just give a couple of examples. So, one common model is to be a data intermediary. These are companies that might take government data. One of the issues that we've sort of just touched on a bit is that even when governments do release data, there may be issues of accuracy, timeliness, quality and so on. So, a number of companies have now set themselves up essentially as intermediaries that make government data more useful to other companies that want to use this to be data on anything from international trade to healthcare to many, many different kinds of models here. In terms of direct revenue generation, you know, subscription services that might make improved data or new kinds of data or new combinations of data available are part of that intermediary role. Consumer focused sites in particular, for example, sites that would provide use open data help consumers choose between different kinds of products and services insurance, for example, or others. Those may be advertising driven. We're seeing a number of companies that work through lead generation. So, for example, some of the successful real estate companies or websites where if they use open data to provide choices to consumers, somebody chooses a particular product service, whatever it is, there can then be a commission, essentially, to the to the site that has provided the that lead through open data. And then finally, we're seeing a number of companies that develop essentially consulting businesses. And this is very interesting model because there are some enigma.io in New York is a is a good example where they've done a wonderful job of taking government data sets, improving those data sets, and actually publishing the improved data for public use, which is a great public service. But then their revenue model is that they understand the data so deeply that they can then consult to major companies that want to figure out how to use government data to improve their business. So I think the good news is that we are seeing a lot of entrepreneurial activity, a lot of startup activity, and that there's really a range of business models developing that these companies can use to be successful and actually fill a public purpose at the same time. So Jed, what's your experience and how do you see that issue? Well, so yeah, I think, you know, one thing that you you touched on throughout is sort of there's there's a lot of work to be done in the sense making realm. So I talked, talked about this a lot where the government puts the data out there. I don't think it's realistic, or even reasonable to expect the government to make data available in ways that make sense to everybody. Right. If we're lucky they put it out in a machine readable, non proprietary format. And if they do that, I'm happy enough, right, because I see that is creating the opportunities for companies like, you know, like you mentioned enigma.io. I love what they do. They've got a really, you know, sophisticated team, they've got a smart team that understands data they understand how to work with it they understand statistics, and they understand data visualization, they're able to use all those skills apply them to the government data produce a useful product for a specific audience that, you know, in a format that that audience can consume and it might be another machine readable format, it might be a report, they do these really cool visualizations. And I think that's wonderful. Another one company like this is Planet OS. So Planet OS they take all sorts of data from know us they take all sorts of climate and weather data, not only from from you know the United States National Oceanographic and atmospheric administration, but from all over the world. And they synthesize various data, data sets and data sources, and then make those available via APIs and other interfaces that developers can use so they take data that's usually made available for a scientific community for scientific research, and they make it available in a format that's very easy for for developers to use. And also for like for energy companies to consume that otherwise wouldn't want to deal with the raw scientific data that comes out of the government. So, you know, we this, I think we hear this all the time these days, you know, like data is the new petroleum or something like that. So there's, there's a whole supply chain and refinement process that goes along with data and that's really where I see the business opportunities existing. The way the data is going to come out of the government, or from the government funded research is almost never going to be. Well, I'll just say it's never going to be useful to everybody. Right. So the business opportunity comes in taking that data and making it, you know, we're finding it as something that somebody else can use. Yeah, I think that's I think that's a great point and actually on our open data impact map and some of the other research we've done we've seen large numbers of these new companies really are functioning as data intermediaries or as you said they're in the sense making business which is I think a great way to think about it. So let's turn to the other side of the coin. What about existing businesses? What about businesses that have been around for a long time? How can they benefit from open data? And Jed, do you want to start on that one? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the resources available to the business. I think there are a lot of, you know, a lot of existing businesses will just think of a, you know, a medium sized firm that's been doing its thing for a long time. If they start to have spare resources, they hire new resources that can actually go out and find government data and start doing their own in-house research, that's great. I think a lot of ways that existing businesses are going to start benefiting from open data is by consuming new data products that are provided as a service that are based on open data themselves. So Joel, like you mentioned, there are all sorts of services they do lead generation or they provide some sort of subscription service like an intelligence report that you can subscribe to, that kind of stuff. I think that's how a lot of existing businesses are going to end up benefiting from open data rather than, you know, building their own teams to go look after it. Of course, it's very hard to say. There are countless kinds of businesses in the world. Some might make sense for them to hire somebody to start sifting through census data. But what I think, you know, we're already seeing happen and we're just going to see more and more in the future is that people will be able to buy data products and services that are informed by open data. And they won't even really know, you know, necessarily that it's coming from open data, but suddenly there's going to be a new service available to them that wouldn't have existed without open data. No, I think that's true. You know, one of the things we in the open data field talk about a lot, I think, is that if we're all really successful, then in 10 years nobody will be talking about open data anymore. It'll just be part of how we all do business and how we all live our lives in a good way. And I think to some degree that is kind of true about how existing businesses use open data. For example, you know, census data, I think direct marketers have been using census data probably for decades to figure out, you know, where they want to send their marketing appeals, how they want to target their marketing to different demographic groups and so on. I think we are also seeing some real new uses as data analysis becomes more sophisticated and has more different kinds of data become available. So, I mean, we tend to think of the uses of open data for business in two major buckets. One would be developing new products and services, and that's, I think, pretty similar to what we were just talking about a minute ago of how entrepreneurs can use open data, you know, an existing business can start a new line of business in a similar kind of way. But also, we talk a lot about or think a lot about how can businesses use data to optimize their operations. So, census data and demographic data, anything that relates to business intelligence, anything that relates to marketing, there are huge uses there. But we're also seeing some very interesting ways now that weather data, I think, in particular is being used. I mentioned before how retailers are using weather data around their supply chains. There's been some very interesting studies where some of the like Walmart or some of the major retailers in the US and I think in other countries in the UK and elsewhere will actually study, you know, what are the patterns of buying consumer behavior that track, you know, a hurricane warning or some other kind of weather event. And between that and then also looking at how weather events are likely to affect the supply chain that brings those products to the stores in the first place. We're seeing some very interesting things. We're seeing telecommunications companies now using demographic and social data in more sophisticated ways to figure out where to site the towers that drive their business. So, I think, you know, in some ways using data to improve your business is not a brand new idea, but I think the capabilities of using new kinds of data in new kinds of ways and bringing together open data with big data are really going to be more and more of a business resource in the years ahead. So we're also being asked, as we talk about how businesses and entrepreneurs are using open data, we're being asked also what types of open data entrepreneurs find most useful and what is there the most demand for. So of all this different kind of government data, what is it that people want to use the most. So we've seen a couple of kind of consistent patterns and Jed be interested to hear what you're seeing as well. Spatial data I think shows up everywhere. You know, mapping capability, the ability to, whether it's in housing, real estate, mapping different kinds of services. I mean, mapping applications I think are everywhere in terms of business applications. Transportation data. We're seeing as kind of a constant in terms of both business development, also municipal development, demographic data. We've been talking about a lot today, environmental and weather data. And also, I think corporate data. So in many countries, for example, we're seeing that when businesses talk about the kind of data they would like to see more open corporate registry business registry data is often very much at the top of the list. Curious what your experience is, Jen on this also. Yeah, it's very similar. I'll start where you left off. I think, you know, business permit data, business registration data is super valuable in cities everywhere. You know, if, if you can get that data in a machine readable format, you can get it in a timely manner. You can really take the pulse of the local economy and start making businesses decisions based on that. You can get insights and notes from where construction projects are happening, what sort of businesses are emerging and growing, what sort of supplies they might need, what sort of staff I might need. It opens the door for a lot of business activity and service delivery within the region. Geographical data is always huge and especially again, well really almost at any level of government, but just knowing what exists where is really valuable and isn't always available in the machine readable format, you know, knowing administrative boundaries, knowing, you know, certain like zoning regulations so like places where you actually can build a business or cannot build a certain kind of business all that kind of data is really really valuable. And useful to get. Increasingly, you know, so Joel, you mentioned, you know, interesting applications of weather data. The funny thing is, is yeah, before like, mere mortals couldn't really do anything with weather data because you needed a lot of computing power. And that's, you know, I'm a, I work for Amazon Web Services. So I tend to think that, you know, access computing power isn't really a huge problem anymore. Anybody can access pretty large amounts of computing power for, you know, for the period of time that they need it. So people are able to do interesting things with weather data in ways that we haven't seen before. And particularly around advertising, which is kind of interesting. Five years ago would be crazy for a company to think, you know, I really, I wonder which of my customers are in the rain right now, or have a coming rainstorm. And if I knew that, could I advertise to them, you know, that was like a pipe dream for an advertiser. Five years ago now it's, you can do that. Yeah, because we have that data now. You know, it is amazing the kinds of opportunities that have been opening up. So I think we have about two more questions and a few more minutes, and then we can have a couple final thoughts. But here's one, Jed, this is a technical question, so I'm going to ask you to answer this one. It's a little bit more difficult than me, but a viewer asks, even when data is available, many startups and small medium enterprises don't have the technical resources that they need to utilize these open data sets. So what can entrepreneurs do to access and use the data effectively? How can they deal with the technical challenges? Oh, I wish there were a silver bullet. I'll tell you this, I work with a lot of very technical people, extremely smart people and people are actually been very smart about data and data science. And I'm not saying to speak on the US Census Bureau, because I like I said before I love the US Census Bureau, but their data is very hard to work with. And so I'll often have these conversations people say like, Hey, let's do something cool with a census. And I'm like, Well, what do you want to do? And I go, I don't know something cool. And it's like, Well, why don't you go to grad school? You know, you can spend a lot of time digging into census data to figure out how to make sense out of it. And there's really no easy way around it. You know, I, I hate to say this, but you might want to learn Python, you might want to learn are there are countless courses available online for free to learn how to start working with data sets. And working working with data, many of which are based on publicly available government data resources. So I look around for those, but there really is no magic bullet to learn how to, you know, work with data and make business out of it. If you have a specific data product that you need, you might be able to buy it as a service now through through some other provider that does the technical work for you. I would actually, I would actually have a somewhat different and maybe a little bit more optimistic view. And, and this is, I'm saying this as somebody who keeps meaning to learn Python and R and this still hasn't done it yet. But I would say if you're a business entrepreneur, you don't actually need to have the technical skills you need to find people who have them. Many places, not only in the US, but all over the world, those people might be, you know, college students or even high school students who are brilliant at coding, but may not have the business idea that you have. One of the phrases I've heard a lot about the application of open data is that the idea should be to start with a problem, not with the data. So, you know, we shouldn't all be sort of saying, gee, let's look at 100 data sets and see what we could do with them. It's more like, okay, I have a problem. Like, I want to help people find better housing or I want to help people find low cost healthcare. I want to help people, you know, be able to get to their do their commute more easily. If you are an entrepreneur and you have a strong idea and you have a general idea that of where the data is it's available. It's often really very practical to find the, you know, brilliant, brilliant coders who can take that on and who may want to do it as part of their own education and their own professional development. So I think really kind of an alliance between business visionaries and people with the technical skills often can be possible. Some problems with government data are very hard to solve like if data is simply missing or has not been collected or is wrong. That's very hard to solve. On the other hand, there are some issues where, for example, data simply needs to be cleaned up in various ways that can be amenable to technical intervention by non-government people. So I think that's at least the place I would say to look. So we have one last question. This is from a viewer on Twitter who's asking, this is a great question. How can open government data help address social issues? So I would say just about all kinds of ways. If you look at our map, the impact map, we make it possible to look at organizations by sector. You know, in other words, who's working on health or the economy or environment or education or any of these things. And we're really seeing applications all over the place, literally all over the map. And I think what's very encouraging about this is that it's not just NGOs and nonprofits and other kinds of organizations like that. Most of the companies that are using open data, I think have a social mission as part of what they do. And I think that's partly because of the kinds of people who are attracted to this work. And it's partly because when you're using open government data almost by default, you're looking at something that's an issue of great public interest and where there's an opportunity to make a difference. So I'm really very optimistic about the ability of open government data to help address social issues, either through a nonprofit approach or through a commercial approach that has a mission together with the revenue mission of the company. And Jed, your thoughts? Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, this is also kind of like I'm talking about a little bit my closing thoughts, but I really feel like the government has this purview. They have a lot of information about their boundaries. Right. And typically, for a long time, sort of like for technical reasons for nearly administrative reasons that that information just hasn't been available to most people. But now, thanks to technology, we can make that available to people. And what that does for society is it is a phrase I use a lot, which is it lowers the cost of knowledge. It allows anybody to know more about where they live. And in terms of societal issues, this is extremely important in areas in terms of things about access to housing, you know, the quality of education that's available to them, quality of public health that's available to them. All that information is known in some form by the government. And as they open that up and make that known to more people, that does create business opportunities. And it also creates, you know, in a healthy functioning democracy, greater opportunities for oversight from citizenry that will hopefully ultimately to better services for people. Jed, I think that's that's terrific. Is there anything else we need to wrap up? But is there anything else you'd like to say in closing or that you really like people doing this to keep in mind? Sure. I'll just echo what I just said. So this phrase of lowering the cost of knowledge, it's really helped me understand it's been useful for me to understand really the value of open data and where the value comes from is, you know, look around out there, look at your communities. Think about what you would like to know about the world and figure out, can we know that? Is that knowable? Does that information exist? And if it does, would anybody pay to know it? Is there a business opportunity there? If so, you might have an opportunity to find that data, take it, you know, you might have to match it up with another data set and produce some sort of product or service that other people would find valuable. And that's that's where the business opportunities lies, figuring out how to lower the cost of knowledge and then sell it for profit. No, I think I would, I think, you know, beautifully said, and I would agree with all of that. I guess the the only other thing I would want to emphasize is that, you know, every business needs resources, every business needs resources that it can acquire cost effectively and use for business generation, revenue generation. Open government data is a huge, huge public resource that we've barely begun to tap. So I think more and more in countries around the world, there's a realization that this data really does belong to taxpayers who ultimately paid to to create it, and that it can be tremendous benefit for citizens and for businesses as well. So I think we're really at a point where we're seeing much more government awareness and much more government eagerness to make this kind of resource available. In our experience, I think the more businesses can articulate what they need, the more governments are likely to respond. And you do not need to be a technical expert to do this, you need to have a great idea. You need to have some idea of where the data is available and it's more and more possible now to see that through government websites and elsewhere. And you need to be able to articulate how that data can be put to business use and public good. So I think the opportunities now are huge. I would say for myself, our center is always very interested in talking to people who have these kinds of ideas if we can be helpful, we would love to do that. I think in our bios, you can see how to contact either Jed or myself or you can simply find us online. But we'd really want to just sort of thank everybody seeing, viewing this today for spending some time with us. Hope this has been helpful. And please continue to think about open data, where it can go, and how we can all do well by doing some good by using this important resource for citizens and businesses for the world. Thank you very much. And thanks for joining us today.