‘Open data’ - the trove of data-sets made publicly available by governments, organisations and businesses - isn’t normally linked to high-wire politics, but just may have saved last month’s Indonesian presidential elections from chaos.
Data is considered open when it’s released for anyone to use and in a format that’s easy for computers to read. The uses are largely commercial, such as the GPS data from US-owned satellites, but data can range from budget numbers and climate and health statistics to bus and rail timetables.
It’s a revolution that’s swept the developed world in recent years as governments and agencies like the World Bank have freed up hundreds of thousands of data-sets for use by anyone who sees a use for them. Data.gov, a US site, lists more than 100,000 data-sets, from food calories to magnetic fields in space.
Consultants McKinsey reckon open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity a year - from performance ratings that help parents find the best schools to governments saving money by releasing budget data and asking citizens to come up with cost-cutting ideas. All the apps, services and equipment that tap the GPS satellites, for example, generate $96bn of economic activity each year in the United States alone, according to a 2011 study.
But so far open data has had a limited impact in the developing world, where officials are wary of giving away too much information, and where there’s the issue of just how useful it might be: for most people in emerging countries, property prices and bus schedules aren’t top priorities.
But last month’s election in Indonesia - a contentious face-off between a disgraced general and a furniture-exporter turned reformist - highlighted how powerful open data can be in tandem with a handful of tech-smart programmers, social media savvy and crowdsourcing. “Open data may well have saved this election,” said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based consultant on democracy and governance.
Culture club
Indonesia, home to 247 million people and some of the world’s largest Facebook and Twitter populations, has been a few steps ahead in embracing open data. It’s one of eight founding members of the Open Governance Partnership (OGP), a government-led initiative to free up data that now has more than 64 members.
The embrace of open data has had few tangible benefits, but created a buzz and fostered a culture that prodded Indonesia’s election commission to tweak the way it handles vote results. “There was nothing in this OGP stuff that said you had to put up results from each village,” said Kevin Evans, a Jakarta-based governance consultant. “But it provides a culture where the commission says, ‘why don’t we try a bit of transparency?’”
While it was not allowed to speed up or ditch the manual tabulation of votes, the commission provided equipment for tallies from nearly half a million polling stations to be scanned and uploaded to its servers, and from there to its website.
