This is Graham Higgins's Typepad Profile.
Join Typepad and start following Graham Higgins's activity
Graham Higgins
Recent Activity
(I didn't know you'd started blogging again, Tom. It's taken me all evening just to catch up.)
You write: "There are real differences between profit-seeking and not-for-profit groups, and they must be kept in mind."
Somewhere in my catching up I think I came across a post in which you expand a little on the distinctions between the two but I can't remember exactly where - maybe I just hallucinated it out of the pattern of weft and woof of your posts. Whatever, if you've ever a yen to explore it, it'd be nice to see a distillation of those real differences.
By way of a weak quid pro quo, the commercialisation would appear to be already under way in the form of care home and schools chooser "apps" based on HMG's open data releases:
http://data.gov.uk/search/apachesolr_search/?filters=type%3Aapps&solrsort=sort_title%20asc
There's a dozen pages of listings of "apps", the vast majority of which would seem to be not-(intended)-for-profit but there does appear to be the beginnings of a separation between the n-f-p and the p-s in terms of chosen domain (care homes, schools, home-buying) - i.e. the low-hanging fruit is already being commercially harvested and it's difficult to see a rationale that would prompt a subsequent n-f-p entry into what are already commercially-dominated areas.
Poking around behind the scenes of some the listed commercial "apps" suggests that the big boys haven't arrived yet (or don't see enough mileage in it). There has been some speculation (perhaps just perennial optimism) that there may be significant business opportunities in the analysis and presentation of open data, given the increasing emphasis on providing "consumer choice". There's certainly room for improvement: I'm picking my way through an analysis of the metadata available for the 4,600 datasets and it's not pretty.
What is Wrong With Government 2.0
- why open data needs a non-commercial-use license, and the lessons of microcredit. “Government 2.0” is the initiative to make government data open to the public using Web-based technologies. Leading light Tim O’Reilly describes it as “government as platform”. The idea is that open data - provi...
Graham Higgins is now following The Typepad Team
Dec 7, 2010
Subscribe to Graham Higgins’s Recent Activity