Wednesday night I went out with my dad and his wife, and on our way back home we discussed news of the world - same as usual - and at at some point I dropped a word : "Open Data"… "Open what?"
So there I was, five more metro stops to go, telling them all I knew about Open Data. The conversation ended abruptly  when they arrived, the parisian "doors are closing" sound rang and doors shut with me continuing my route. before getting out of the metro, my stepmother had the time to exclaim: "In a time of budget cuts from the government, they're spending money on this? Unbelievable…"

So I went back home, thinking about how I failed to explain open data to my parents, and thinking about a way to make it up.

What is Open Data?

It is simply data that has been collected by public institutions, utility entities, or even privately owned companies that is made public and thus openly and widely shared with anyone who wants to reuse it.

Why Open up Data?

1. Open Data is a model for democracy. It favors public transparency and citizen's good information. The data - which by the way is already collected with public funds - is made available and therefore given back to those who pay to collect it (citizens who pay their taxes) ; it is not proprietary and becomes a public service.

2. Open Data is a lever of economic development.
- By making the material of digital developments and innovations available to all, it sustains innovation, and we all know how important innovation is for economic development.
- It encourages all kinds of research - in universities, labs, observatories, think tanks…
- it favors the emergence of new applications (in a very broad sense, not only on the Apple AppStore), especially in a more and more digital economy.

What's the opportunity?

Open Data opens up a wide range of original applications and surprising results by offering the opportunity to cross different sets of data, to visualize it, to mine it, to aggregate it… (a statistician's dream!). The truth is that no matter what numbers they give you, nobody is able to predict the impact Open models can have, because new services are going to pop out of it, and new services from these services, and so on. The open economy is an opportunity by itself. People are running businesses on Open stuff (Open Source, Open Licences, and Open Data… it's all part of the same game) and the model is spreading.

At faberNovel, we believe in OpenData. We work with the French Governement and its OpenData division Etalab, read more.