 On your chairs, you'll find a report that I've been writing for the last six months. It was commissioned by the Amidiar Network, and it talks about Open Data's impact in the UK. I've been involved in the Open Data world for more than a decade, and when Amidiar approached me to ask if anything to do with Open Data had had any effect in the world, I really couldn't miss the opportunity to have a good go at answering that question. It was a six-month project, and it was interview-based, and one of the reasons that I was so inspired to answer Amidiar's call was because I have never seen an idea catch fire the way that Open Data has. Like I say, I've been involved for more than ten years, and when I started, the idea that in ten years' time we might be discussing Open Data in a venue as prestigious as a BFI with 700 people attending a set out conference was more than I could imagine. But ideas catching fire is one thing, and what this report really aimed to do, and what Amidiar really wanted out of it, was to see whether, for all the excitement that we feel about Open Data and the projects that we are passionate about, whether we could pin down some serious tangible impact in the real world. Often it's very easy to sit and to listen to some of the amazing projects that we've heard about today in this theatre, and just from the theory of change or even from the amount of users to speculate what impact that might have in the world and to get really excited, and I certainly wouldn't want to stop that excitement in any way, but the aim of this report and this project was to see where Open Data was having an impact in the world outside, to the extent that my mother-in-law, when she called me up after she heard Nigel Shadbolt on Radio 4 and said, now I finally understand what you're doing, it's not the mother-in-law test, but it's something like that, and thanks to some very generous thinkers that shared their time and expertise with me at the beginning of this project, I soon learned that studying impact is actually really, really hard. Impact can come in many forms, it can be measured in terms of economics, we can talk about it in terms of social terms, we can talk about it in political or environmental terms. That's easy enough, but it's diffuse. The Open Data value chain is very, very large from the people who release the data to those who interpret it, to those who use the products that intermediaries create, to all the people beyond that whose lives may benefit because of Open Data. The barriers to impact can be multiple and entrenched. I soon found that transport data could have a huge impact released in and of itself, and that's not a new finding, but in terms of our hopes to maybe solve climate change, solve air pollution, we may have the data, there'll be other barriers there to the kind of impact that I was looking for in this report. The theory of change that is unique to Open Data is resistant to traditional impact measurement. Normally, when we are expecting to evaluate impact, we want an idea of what the people who publish data set out to do, but Open Data, by its very nature, is we're public to the data because we don't know what people could do with it. In that way, it was kind of resistant to traditional impact measurement. Also, it's arguably too soon to see the complete picture for Open Data. Anyone looking for a systematic framework approach to evaluating Open Data impact, I think, based on these barriers, they're going to be sorely disappointed. Instead, what I began to see and what I've argued in this talk today is that although we might be able to talk about the potential of Open Data in sweeping terms, we could talk about putative economic benefits from opening data, and the mediaeur and others have been very strong producing reports that speculate on that potential. Actually, in terms of its impact, we're only likely to see that in fragments in what I called a million stories. Now, I'm not going to tell a million stories today. The report actually tells six, or arguably, five stories about Open Data impact here in the UK, and I am going to shoot through some of them. There are copies of the report there. It's also available online, as of today. Some of the key takeaways, I'm just going to flash past you now. I'm going to do it really fast, just so as a way to show you how much information there is. Please don't try and read all the slides. My first subject of study was Transport for London. They're not a new subject of study in terms of Open Data impact, and they're understood to be a champion in this space of the amount of data that they use, but also because of the amount of people that are reusing that data. There are over 360 apps in Apple Android and, I think, another app store in total that use Transport for London data at the moment. There's an interesting study by Deloitte on Transport for London data that was commissioned as part of the Shakespeare Review in 2013, and it uses a very interesting approach to the value of people's time, and using that approach, Deloitte found that people were saving tens of millions of pounds just by using the apps created on TFL's data. An equivalent amount, or at least a comparable amount, to the monetised time savings that were being used to advocate for high-speed rail 2, which is a major infrastructure project and requires much more investment than the more or less one million pounds that TFL invested in order to get their data out there. What I like about the TFL story is that it shows you that Vernon Everett at TFL said that if he had been asked to write a business case for releasing, he's the open data champion at TFL, and he said if he had been asked to write a business case for releasing TFL data, he'd still be writing it today. In his view, there is no business case for releasing open data. It is a leap of faith. I mean, there is a business case, there's no transport industry business model standard business case we're doing. It's essentially a leap of faith. What's great is that now that TFL have made that leap of faith, other transport authorities who are in various commercial strictures feel empowered to do the same. That's why TFL is such a great story. The second institution that I looked at was Her Majesty's Land Registry. I spoke to a load of estate agents and proctech entrepreneurs for this case study. That was a lot of fun. It became very clear that even though HM Land Registry are only releasing a subset of their land records at the moment, mainly the data that pertains to you and I rather than institutions that have owned property in this country for years, corporations or people who inherit vast waves of property in this country, even though that small subset is our data, our houses, there's a lot of investment that is following that data in terms of the proctech industry and also estate agency is changing and here is one estate agent with a testimony as to how HMLR's data has changed his business. I also wanted to look at the way that open data was changing advocacy and because I have a history as an advocate myself when I was executive director of the Open Rights Group, which is a campaign group here in the UK, I was really keen to understand whether open data could succeed in and of itself in improving advocacy and what I found was that although open data could really contribute in a significant way to advocacy campaigns that traditional advocacy was still just as important, real, politic, knowing the right people, knowing the buttons to push, knowing the public messages that are going to embarrass politicians sufficiently to instigate change and that was the key message of the report. Another case I took on was the Open Public Services Network they're a fantastic organisation that have come out of the RSA and they have a really nuanced understanding of how data and public service improvement are related and I'd really encourage anyone thinking about public service improvement to read that chapter of the report simply because Roger Taylor has got a lot of smarts there particularly when talking about personal data and what is stopping data driven public service improvement in the UK. The last open data case I looked at was a favourite of mine which is They Work for You. I interviewed Tom Steinberg for The Guardian in 2005 They Work for You has been going for an awfully long time and looking at them provided a bit of an opportunity to look at the long term impact of open data or rather civic data because actually they work for you predates open data policy in the UK. I had a lot of fun here because I applied Deloitte's monetised time savings methodology to civil society members and journalists using They Work for You which if you don't know is an accessible version of the parliamentary proceedings and I did a lot of multiplying and some averaging and some hypothesising and worked out that using a kind of bastardised version of Deloitte's methodology They Work for You was saving civil society and journalists Oh, that's my timer. Sorry, video. Stop. Anyway, I gave myself five minutes less for questions so I'll just keep going quickly. They Work for You has delivered £2 to £70 million worth of savings annually to the UK economy based on that methodology. I think it's valuable. I think it's valid. I think that civil society actors and journalists time is just as valuable as commuters time. Just a quick word about why there's a non-open data study Rufus Pollock reminded me that any useful study of open data impact should consider the counterfactual and Celiac's UK's use of brand banks data on food and allergens is a story that's very close to my heart because I have a Celiac daughter. Read the study if you want to understand what all of this means. In short, it really gives a window on how rich sort of frictionless data sets can transform people with particular needs from the supply chain from the food supply chain can transform their lives. I wanted to include it because I wanted to make the point that it's not always about the openness perhaps that we're seeing impact. Sometimes it can be about the richness of the data set, its relevance to a particular community or its ability to be translated onto platforms like smartphones, all of which were present in this case, that the impact comes. I think open data would be a great way for a brand bank to go but they've just been acquired by Nielsen so we'll see how that goes. I want to kind of finish this talk with two challenges to this community which has grown so much in the time that I've been involved in open data. We heard anyone who was in NFT1 this morning heard the minister, heard Matthew Hancock not rule out privatising the trading funds and selling their data as the previous government did with the privatisation of Royal Mail. We also are in a government where the Freedom of Information Act is currently under review. Open data has enjoyed a very collegiate relationship with government and policymakers but it may be time for that attitude to change or we may have to adjust to new circumstances so I'd like to ask everyone in this room if open data is important to you as a business if open data is important to you as a citizen to look and keep a good eye on what's happening policy-wise and to make sure the government remains committed to open data over the course of this parliament and the next lot. Finally, a quote from Chris Taggart that I really love because although this report is all about looking at the evidence and the impact of open data, I share his view that open data is as much a right as it is an economic policy and it's probably time for us to ask our opponents to argue for closed data because open data looks like the future and I certainly count myself as a member of Generation Open so I think I left one minute and 40 seconds for questions. Thank you very much. Thank you, Becky. Do we have any questions? Or I could just talk for another minute and a half. I guess I have a question if I may. So you mentioned before the guy from TFL who said if you had to write a business case he would still be writing it. Do you think that open data is so disruptive that it essentially will have to push some of those systems and processes out of the way for businesses to actually be able to adopt more open data practices or if you want stories like this that actually have impact in how businesses operate? I don't know if you can hear me through this. I think government is in a unique position to show the way here so just like TFL released its data and then you saw the people behind national rail inquiries, the ATOC operators feel empowered to do so I think because government is able to take those kinds of risks it should and I was having thrown a stone at the minister about the trading funds I was really enthused to him say that you can't tell what open data is going to do I have his exact words written down, they're not here but it was something to the extent of you have to open the data and then you'll see what happens and I think if Atom Treasury are listening to that that would be really fantastic. Kind of suck it in C. The more stories we have like this and the reason I think a media network wanted to investigate these stories in greater depth was you may not be able to model it for your own business or your own context but if you see more and more people taking the leap of faith and succeeding I got to know Brand Bank quite intimately they were very open to me off the record about their business models and I could kind of see that they were almost close to a subheading on an ODI business case they were that close to opening it but I do understand why people have reservations and that's why it's great that Government as a massive data collector is able to lead the way and to set these examples and I just think we need to keep doing it. Thank you very much, we have a question down here. I'll give you my mic. The mic's gone. Thanks. Andrew Clark, a media network. On the question of the Celiac UK case it sounded from what I remember reading was that it was about a social impact organisation being quite reliant on a closed data set for its business model, for keeping its revenues. Did you find any other generalisable conclusions about CSOs or NGOs not releasing their own data for the wider good? Oh yeah, no, I think I know what you're talking about. I'm not sure that bit made it into the final report. Yeah, I really answered that. There were a lot of hypotheticals in the Celiac and Brand Bank UK case and whereas I speculate in the published version of the report that Brand Bank could benefit from opening up its data because it's a bit like HMLR, the people, it's a supply side fee. Generally they want people to have as much access to their data about food and allergens and stuff as possible. They eventually populate Amazon and Accardo and all those platforms with food data. I wasn't quite sure whether Celiac UK would benefit from opening up its data because it relies on, the data has to be of such a high quality to benefit Celiac and moreover Celiac pay money to Celiac UK and that helps them lobby on policy and stuff. So I guess because I had a person and in a way I kind of felt like I was suddenly empathising with Ordnance Survey all of a sudden because actually what would happen if Celiac UK lost its membership subscriptions would it be able to campaign as effectively as it has done on food and were those membership subscriptions being driven by access to this rich data about food allergens that it was getting from Brand Bank and that it had got itself through other means before Brand Bank and this partnership which is fairly recent, it's about two years old. So yeah I began to feel like I was slightly having empathy with Ordnance Survey and all these other ones taking the sleep of faith essentially. So yeah, I think that's a valid question to ask as a follow-up actually because I think it's pretty much the same issue. Thank you very much. Thanks once again, Becky.