 I was one of the highlights of my year meeting Amy last year and she was kind enough to point it out. I'n sure that these two will be no disappointment. No pressure! I'm also slightly relieved of some of the way that in my taxi the tax driver said, Where are you going? I said I'm going to an open data conference. He sort of said, I just really don't know what I think about that. I said, really? He said, yea I just think it's just going on far too much with young people. I thought this isn't what I think. I've worked out, I've talked about OpenDating. So, we're not going to talk about OpenDating, we are all going to talk about OpenData and two fabulous people on the stage with me and I'll let them introduce themselves but I have referred to myself before as somebody kind of shouted at me in the street that I was a dotcom dinosaur. So I am hoping that you guys will make me feel a bit less Jurassic and a lot more connected. Do you want to just quickly kick off telling us what's your name and where you come from? I'm Ben Webb. I've done a lot of stuff with particularly open data standards for international transparency. So I did a bunch of work directly with the International Aid Transparency Initiative and in April I co-founded open data services to do a lot of the same sort of work for with other data standards such as the open contracting data standard and 360 giving the UK philanthropic data standard. A lot of the stuff I specifically do is kind of software development to build tools that help people with the data publishing process to these standards. Feminist, thank you. And George? My name is George Edwards. I'm the founder of my Startup Gas Sense. It's a spin-out from my A-level coursework looking at the technology to monitor LPG both in sort of small installations right up to big industrial things. So obviously we're creating quite a lot of data and sort of internet of things space. I'm given my background and my age quite interested in why lots of young people don't look at engineering and technology as a viable career. So I do quite a lot of work around that. And there's lots of generational profiles, as we'll tell you, my loss are all quite interested in social change. So we sort of tried that as an angle. We went into a school a couple of weeks ago and obviously the refugee crisis was right at the forefront of everybody's minds. So we took, I had already given a load of sensors to the aid workers going out with gas bottles for the soup kitchens. So we pulled all the data off those and overlaid that with a load of data from publicly available data from where the refugee camps were and where the refugees were. So we could overlay our information of where the aid was with where the people were. And in the morning with a load of students that had never looked at technology properly, we were able to create a heat map of where aid should be targeted. And something as sort of simple and fairly easy to do is that really struck a chord with them. So that's my interest in open data and how it can integrate with this new generation. Fabulous. Before we get into a bit more of the detail of what you two are both working on. I'm interested in your perspectives on, I don't want to be patronising, but the different age groups that you both come from. One of my challenges as people in this audience may know has been, I feel like sometimes this community talks to itself quite a lot. And in this room we're all very keen and passionate about this subject. And I'm interested whether you think that more broadly from your peers or people that you know the sense of open is as strong as that you would find in this room. Ben, do you want to? I think it's a difficult question for me because I always struggle to separate the change in the world at large in terms of people's perspectives on this and the change in terms of the people I've ended up surrounding myself with. Self-selecting group. But I think with open data particularly it could be quite interesting to kind of watch kind of the edge of where people's awareness of that is because I, you know, quite familiar with the more general open source community. And I think whilst there's obviously a massive overlap, open data is not necessarily as well known as you might expect. Would you say your generation is more open than you perceive others to be? I think that's the, yeah, I think so. And I think there's a lot going on with private data at the moment and how young people see that because I think it's not even quite, my generation is people a bit younger than me aren't using Facebook to be sharing loads of stuff. They're using more private services like Snapchat and so on. But on the other hand, I think young people's expectations of services they interact with are quite different. And I think their expectations of government services are that they should work much like the other stuff, you know, other services they interact with. To bottle you and take you with me when I go around government because that is exactly the point that they think the expectation is now set so high. Is that those sentiments that you recognise? Yes, certainly. I think the underlying kind of core belief is there but I don't think people recognise it. I think there's a big issue, the press are far more interested in personal privacy and everyone's trying to steal your data and you've got to protect it. Again, with young people at schools it's all about protect what you put on Facebook because it's going to damage your career prospects and it's all terribly scary. Do you think that's right? No, it's a completely separate issue and in itself the backlash that that's causing is really threatening a lot of this really powerful stuff that can be done. I think that people understand it, they just need it, it needs to be communicated that it is happening and what the whole range of work in the data space is and it's not just about your phones being hacked. I agree with you about the media perception, I think that one of the things I've found funny I do a lot of work in digital skills and helping people get online for the first time and I was sitting a while ago with a mother and a daughter and the mother was probably at 55-60 and she recently got on Facebook and she was loving it, she was posting all kinds of pictures of herself and her daughter who was about 18 was saying I'm going mum, you are probably nuts to do that, you don't want all that stuff out there and it was a completely different, it was kind of interesting to what people expect of those two generations. But to tell us a bit more, you've both kind of done your own thing and one of the things I find really interesting about classified generation open as a younger generation is that your perspective in terms of how you build your career and what you do is so different even to when I went into work 20 years ago, five years was my time frame or maybe 10 even whereas I think my perception is that you guys are building things in much smaller project based ways. Would you say that was true and how does that feed into your projects now you're thinking about things? You've gone straight into entrepreneurialism, practically from your A levels. I think with again it's a media thing but also with the way that technology has affected my generation which is a generation that almost all of our education has been entirely supported by the internet and by digital. People are quite aware and quite willing and encouraged to look beyond the standard career path and look more widely afield. I think projects particularly from the technical side which is what I'm interested in and again many of the people that I spend time with are interested in that. So entrepreneurialism and technology typically work well on project levels and it's far easier to go and specifically research something, work on it and then communicate it. Those are the sort of behaviours that technology drives so I think that is something that particularly young people quite like working in that way and they respond well to it. So what kind of time frame do you have in your work? I guess like you say fair relatively short time frames but I guess it's tricky to unpick what of that's my personal approach to think and how much of it is that the open data space is very young and lots of very new projects that are currently working on fairly short time frames. Just because they're at that sort of very early stage. So if we stand two or three years out and look back at what you two have done over the next two or three years what will you be shouting about do you think? That's a good question. Too many things. Go on, take a pun. I mean I think a big part of what I'm trying to do at the moment is working in this general effort towards data standardisation as part of open data because I think if there's one thing I think of when I hear generation open is kind of having the assumption of open. It's kind of the air that we breathe and that kind of open by itself is not enough and I think points in the open data charter kind of really underscore that a lot of the work I'm doing is around standardisation but I think really the thing I'd like to look back on is seeing the work I'm doing being useful. So I think use of this data is really the end goal and I think there's various routes towards having that. I think standardisation is one of them. Did you want to talk in a bit more detail about your project because we haven't heard it really described by you? So at opening to services we're working with a variety of data standards organisations. So one of them is the open contracting partnerships that has the open contracting data standard and others 360 giving which has a philanthropic, is a UK philanthropic data standard. We do some work around the international age transparency initiative as well and our approach to our work around that is trying to build tools that are useful across all these different projects and kind of help make publishing to these standards easier for people and also help make sense of the data that has been published. So you would really agree with Nigel's point that we've got to think about data as infrastructure and those? Yes, yes. Very much so I think particularly with the contracting information it's kind of that project as a whole is kind of at fairly early stages but potentially that's going to be a massive piece of infrastructure information about contracts and contracts. When George Osborne announced his infrastructure commission that you may have heard about which is a good attempt I think to have some longer term planning in government you would have seen a sort of barrage of tweets coming out from me that morning because there was no mention of digital as part of that infrastructure let alone open data and I get frustrated I think when we still don't seem to embed to your point kind of the default should be both digital and open I would argue. Do you perceive the same challenges in what you're doing around common standards? I think so, yes. It's interesting and again we've kind of touched on it today already but the difference between it's quite easy because a lot of what the government does because of this sort of funding model is quite easy to say that that should be open here can we help you. My background is from the sort of commercial world and again they've got vast quantities of data that's been specifically designed to be so valuable and creating ways and helping the private sector make that open and create value from it being open. And I think you know in sort of three, five, ten years time however long it takes we need to get away from the sort of traditional sort of mindset where you sort of create data, protect it and defend it and it's our value and I've finished working for BAE systems so you're obviously right down the far end of the data spectrum and everything's got to be a secret as you can possibly make it. But they've got to understand that there's actually a huge amount of value for them regardless of whether it's a nice philanthropic thing and it helps other people but just for them there's value in it being in them open sourcing some of their data and letting other people see it. So I find it difficult where I'm standing from talking to young people and educational communities who are very receptive to it and then going and pitching or being in a business conversation and you get that sort of blank look and oh that's a terrible idea, why would you do that, you know you've got to patent everything and secure your value just because that's a much more obvious sort of comfortable thing to do exactly. So how do you overcome that? Well there are some good tricks. Wow. Examples help and there are very few but some good examples of where a sort of modern mindset has worked. So Tesla is a good example saying all of their IP is open because it will help people develop electric cars and if they become accepted then we will benefit. Toyota saying we can do manufacturing better than everyone else but we'll tell them how we do it because then more people will develop and the supply chain will be far better at it. I'm on the board of Marks and Spencer and when I suggested really that in a board meeting you should have seen the faces. I'm sure. As opposed to if you had suggested that we hide more security guards to stop that happening that would have gone down far better. So that's interesting and I think that there's a lot of work to be done there, selling examples and getting businesses to see that there is a huge tangible value and that companies don't die by not protecting themselves. They die by creating genuine value. I think there is a big cultural shift to try and have that but I think within government that they're further along I think in terms of this cultural shift towards open and I think we're at an early stage of that in business. I think something that might help drive this forward is the cases where private companies are delivering stuff to government. The governments need to start increasingly saying we're going to require you to produce this data. The big example I'm kind of aware of is with the International Aid Transparency Initiative. The Department for International Development in the UK has started requiring those that give money to both NGOs and private sector to publish data about what they're doing with that aid money. I think you're absolutely right so I'm asking maybe a slightly trickier question. If you could do any kind of dream project for a company or an organisation where would you really love to get stuck in it? Would it be a systems? Would it be a government department? What is it that you would love to be able to say yes we're going to create a completely different model of openness? I think it's interesting so again as I say I take interest in the way that young people view engineering and I tried and the project failed so the roadblocks we've already discussed to get BAE one of the companies but a couple of these huge big engineering companies that have vast teams of people employed to collect data about their recruitment processes and the apprentices and graduates that they hire and they've got lots of data and it's in everyone's mutual interest that that information can be brought together to produce genuine insight about how they should target young people to be more effective in their aims to make them look at technology and they just couldn't do it. They just couldn't bring themselves to talk to people that aren't their competitors, they're just in the same space and I was really taken aback and shocked by that. So being in a place where there are these big programmes that the companies are already working on and getting them to realise across the organisation that open data is valid and likely the best tool for them to realise those aims so I don't know I would necessarily be interested in any particular outcome but the serious outcomes that the business is already looking at and getting them to see it much like the infrastructure getting them to see it in the same box and not something that the corporate social responsibility people deal with. How about you Ben? I think I kind of identified some of this in the work I'm doing currently because I think with the open contracting data standard there are a lot of large companies interested in that because there's a business position for them to be selling the procurement systems. People are using the Ben output this data so I think that's really making the right incentives and driving this business case for producing open data as a feature of what they're selling to their customers is quite important. It's interesting to me that you both pick, we've talked quite a lot about private company examples and the way I find that kind of reassuring because I think it goes back to how does the sector build links outside just the sector itself and also again the data I read about generations younger than me is that there is just an assumption that businesses should do the right thing and there's a kind of assumption that you need that social purpose which maybe sounds ridiculous to you guys but wasn't it given when I was starting in my working life 20 years ago I think it was sort of the CSR box as you say over there and that's moved very quickly. I think that's something you recognise. Yeah certainly and it's a very, even in business but kind of across the landscape it's seen as a modern thing to do which is surprising but again through my work I've worked a lot with Virgin and Branson and that's been something critical to what they've done right from when they started out. Let's look at a sort of modern, open and positive way of doing things because it benefits everyone and again you can go back to sort of really cold hard economic maths and prove that that's a benefit to everyone. Yes, Q&A don't worry I'm on it. I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to throw it open to you now. So some questions for these bright young people who are going to make our future better. Please anybody like to ask anything? Wave a hand in the air. There's a gentleman in the middle there. Great. I think both of you are really very inspiring so that's first comment but the big question I have is related to your education and do you feel that you've had to sort of strive to show that you're interested in the worlds that you're in or that you've been supported it through your school? Because for me I wonder whether or not there's enough going on in schools to help you and people like you, like my children, or are you very well supported which is my hope? I was very well supported at school. I think I was very lucky. I think it was quite unusual that the support that I had so I went to the King School Canterbury and they had a big established engineering department which I think is very unusual. I will sit that as a course so I had the support from a technological perspective. I had some spectacular mentors from industry that came and worked with me on my projects. And then when I said that the suggestion was made that I started looking at it as a business, the school was very supportive and made the first introductions for me to go down the patenting route and there was a whole network that was made available to me and I was very lucky to have that. I was very sort of strongly encouraged to look beyond the education on the university spheres and really take advantage of everything that was there despite my age. I hear from a lot of the work that I do in schools that that isn't the case for everyone. I think it should be and that's critical to why I try and do everything that I can to close that disparity. I'm kind of the opposite. When I was at school there were no computer science courses. There was IT and A-level computing which was quite lacking. IT courses weren't taught by IT teachers. They were taught by geography and other teachers. So I think kind of over the past, well, I think up until recently IT and particularly programming education in schools has been very lacking. And I think that is slowly starting to change. I think there's a lot of good work happening in that space to try and improve that. I think there's various groups like Co-Club and Co-Didojo and something I've personally been involved in was Unruwide State. They're all right. It's interesting isn't it that at the same time all this stuff becomes more important to arguably there's a bigger disparity between both of your experiences in education and I agree that's a big concern. Anyone else? Gentleman at the front? Whip down. Do you want to shout? I'll repeat the question if we can't hear. Thank you very much for the discussion. I used to run an organisation called Engineers Without Borders. We did a lot of work around Generation Open about trying to help people to understand when they need to apply linear thinking that we get taught in schools and when we need to apply network thinking which is what we experience every day. But when you're running an organisation or running a startup or trying to set something new you have to always interface between this rather harsh linear world where you have grant applications and deadlines and key performance indicators as a sort of a world of scientific management, project management, very reductionist approach. And a world where it is about partnerships and coalitions and about empowering people and it's about creating change rather than creating impact rather than indicators. I found that particular experience of trying to interface between these two worlds exhausting. However you found it. It's a really interesting one and certainly quite marked with the, I haven't yet had my sort of transitional phase with the university so I'm on my gap now so I've just finished school. So it's kind of quite marked. I think that generally the engineering mindset has helped, that's been my sort of underlying process and people and mixing those two bits together sort of have got me through. But I think it's a big challenge and particularly with my kind of lack of experience and sort of desire to be innovative, trying to apply that sort of networked, much more holistic, rounded approach to many of the linear processes causes strife but value if I can make it work. So I think it's really interesting and a lot of things are changing. Grant applications unfortunately aren't one of them. But yes. I think it is a challenge and I think personally I've been working with others that I think have been taking on more of the brunt of managing those two worlds. And I think it's definitely one of the things where kind of grappling where there's a new organisation at Open Data Services so I'll let you know how that goes. Ask all these, find it hard to. Let's have one more question and I'm going to look around. There's a woman to ask a question, that's what we want. Hello, Ruth McKernan in the UK. So my organisation is there to build and grow new businesses. Most of those are product type businesses which might take 10 years to make a product and start getting revenue. So in digital businesses that might be 10 minutes or 10 hours. So how would my organisation most help you? Sure. So I'm slightly different in that we are sort of hardware so we're kind of in the middle ground. I think in terms of the, with the sort of faster pace or the sort of medium pace, there's a lot of additional support. So in a really long term project, you know, for the first five or six years, it's mostly going to be money is going to be in that the primary issue and you're not particularly, you know, you don't have that many issues to face like sort of marketing and PR and lots of the more holistic things that the businesses struggle with. With digital and sort of semi digital, semi hardware where I'm at, there's a kind of interesting paradigm where engineers typically are the people involved because you're building products. You've very quickly got to get to grips with the sort of plethora of other issues that jump up right from sort of accounting to PR and marketing. And I think that's, I mean there's a huge amount of good work going on in the sort of start-up space to aid that transition but getting engineers sort of fit for business is a challenge, a big challenge and one that I sort of struggled with. So I think everything that can be done there, from a mentoring perspective, from a tangible support perspective, but I mean even if you give someone loads of money that they can only spend on marketing, that still doesn't necessarily help. It's what you do with it and you can waste a lot of that money easily. How about you? This is a dream question. Help on the plate. Help on the plate. I think one of the interesting questions for us is primarily, you know, a lot of what OVD services delivers is services, is in a sense kind of working out what our products actually are because that kind of, that can be a useful way of thinking about things but it's not part of the challenge. It is working out what it is, what is the core of what you're delivering and what do you want to be delivering and what are the steps to get that. That kind of ties back doesn't it to the same point about all those support bits and pieces. Well, as always, I feel like the future is in safe hands and I hope that it will be as open as you two are striving for it to be and know that everyone in this room will be inspired by you and endeavour to help you. So thank you for joining me on the stage.