Flavia Fontana-Giusti

Last week, a delegation of fabernovelians participated in the DataConnexions workshop on the French Open Data platform Etalab organized by Google Paris. On top of getting us beautiful men size tee shirts mentioning that we love data, the event gave us a broad overview of the state of Open Data in France:

Open data en France:

How it works. France's governmental Open Data initiative, called Etalab, is a platform designed to encourage innovation. Over 200 people in the various administrations have been busy over the last year collecting data to populate the platform. In France, all the public data collected by the administration should be made available to the public, since the 1978 law, and Etalab has ben designed to effectively complete this juridic frame.

So for the moment France's initiative gives public data back to the public, and the objective is not to create new datasets that do not already exist.
The platform runs under an open license equivalent to CCby which is compatible with other major public data licenses around the globe.
The objective of the platform is still not defined, it is up to the developer who are yet to plug their applications on Open Data.

So now that we (more or less) have it, what can we do with Open Data ?

Informe. Public Open Data contributes to public transparency, a fundamental element of democracy, but it means something only if the data is reused, analyzed and restituted to the public.Some examples :

• Le véritomètre d'OWNI + iTélé: France is campaigning for it's next president. OWNI and i-Télé created a tool that analyzes in real time the assertions and promised of the cadidates and restitutes their effects on a graph to measure their truthfulness.
• Voxe: A tool to illustrate what's being debated, to help citizens make their choice.
• Every kind of data viz: Data visualization is a new discipline, combining graphic design, journalism, statisticians giving food for thought by putting into perspective raw data.
     example: faberNovel and Etalab
     example in the UK: where does my money go?

Explore. By making us understand phenomena, Open Data opens up the opportunity to create new uses:

• Mapping: datapublica released a map of corporal car accidents in France  which opens up the possibility to lead efficient road safety plans;
• Like in New-York City, map all food safety rules infringements in Paris' Restaurants so that the customers are better advised on what they buy.

Invent. Using open data may translate into new services or new experiences. Why not apply or use Open Data in all innovations? Here are a few examples:

• Home'nGo: a website easing the painful steps of homesearch, using geolocalized open data to enrich their maps in order to neutrally informe the user on the houses' areas.
• Joshfire factory: Joshfire recently launched a factory, sort of lab based on open data, destined to enable its users to create cross device apps in just a few minutes.

The rest is up to us. The possibilities are endless. Let's get  creative!

A few weeks ago I registered for a design jam at La Cantine, in Paris. I am curious about these formats, but had never attended a hackathon for my incompetence with code. So this was the occasion. I'm not a proper designer with degrees issued by design schools (I'm a business school outcome), but I design new things every day, so I went for it, blind, I had no idea what I was headed for, nor if I had my place there.

What is a Design Jam ?

Held all around the world, Design Jams are supported by the Mozilla Foundation.
Design Jams gather designers in the broadest meaning: ergonomists, web designers, interface designers, product designers, UX designers, users… with an unclear goal : to innovate all together and come out with new ideas.
One main theme, open and wide, is at the center of the jam session, and participants are mixed in teams of 6 or 7 designers to come up with their solution. The theme is a complete surprise, the organizers announce it on friday night.
In the end, no winner, no prize, but a handful of awesome projects waiting to get real.

Sound.

That was the main theme, they announced it on Friday night, before introducing us to our teams, and I must confess that I was relieved and perplexed. Perplexed, because I can't say I know anything about sound or music ; relieved, because most of the people in the room were not better than me in that matter.

As soon as the theme was announced, I started hearing differently, I started listening differently. I started realizing I lived in a world of sound (I am no musician, I seldom realize this sort of things), and I almost never listened to it.

On the first evening we met each other and started sharing our experiences with sound. It was all fussy and most of our insights were somehow poor, we had something to drink, listened to sound of beer bubbles, and went home.
That night I dreamed about tinkering artistic installations, about my ex-noisy neighbors who always used  to complained about all their neighbors. Talk about a full immersion experience…

Saturday morning we had a low tech brainstorming workshop. Only stickies, paper, pen, modeling clay, a whiteboard, some rope and our imagination. At noon, for the first restitution. the eight groups pitched one by one their ideas, and though there was lot of good material, there was still no killer concept and the biggest challenge was to differentiate all these ideas.  

During and after lunch, everybody worked at refining their concepts, and even if in the morning the deprivation of technology generated some frustration, most of us kept brainstorming in a low tech mode to converge and all agree before we started producing actual prototypes on our computers. The afternoon was probably the toughest moment of the day, for everyone : we had to compromise on our disagreements for it was time to prototype, and everybody kept sticking to their initial idea ; at the same time, the most disruptive ideas had obviously some serious flaws and we had to fix them quickly and dirtily. In the end, the concept wasn't perfect, but it was not the purpose, and nobody's concept actually was but, as one of the mentors told me, all the material presented was good and most of the projects deserved to be pushed further.

Even though we are used to speed and to facilitate workshops at faberNovel, the experience proved to be intense and a good exercise to keep in shape. The idea of transposing the hackathon format to other competencies is great : creativity is fed with constraints, and time among them. To be repeated.

From the 19th century word referring to a freak in circus side-shows (in some cases, the performance included biting the head off a live chicken), to the 1990's pejorative term of a nerdy technologist, the word "geek" keeps evolving.

A few days ago, a bunch of parisian faberNovelians were featured in a long article of Le Figaro Magazine as ultimate "geeks" (read: "narcissistic representatives of generation Y, overconfident and ultra-connected").

This specific use of the word reveals a shift: now that technology is making it to the masses, now that it is becoming mainstream and such a huge part of our daily lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, an entire generation can be considered as geek. What used to be a pejorative term for marginals is now applied to the entire cohort of "digital natives". The word doesn't make anymore sense in the meaning we are used to give it.

Hence the question: what does "geek" mean in 2012?

I personally have no answer to that question, so I went asking around what other faberNovelians thought. Here are a few answers from our team :

Arnaud M.: "iIt is someone who fiddles about, who diverts an object from its primary use."

Solène M.: "A geek is someone who would never answer that question."

Xavier M.: "geek is the new glam."

Maxime C.: "Today, the best way to define what is a geek, is to send pictures of geeks."

Marguerite M.: "There is always geekier than one's self (the second floor - Applidium), or less geek than one's self (my grandmother)."

John G.: "My own take on the word "geek" in the U.S. is that it has gone out of fashion.  Nobody in tech thinks of themselves as geeks anymore, even if they're linux programmers.  Tech is too mainstream."

Julian N.: "Geek means becoming contextually aware of more things than you ever imagined possibly due largely, but not solely, to technology."

Clearly "geek" has transcended its circus origins, and even its more recent negative connotations.  But can anyone agree on what it means today?

What's your take?  What does "Geek" mean to you today?

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.