Having a rich seam of public data would be useful right now
• Unless it moves fast SA risks finding itself again on the wrong end of a resource’s value chain
You know that “data is the new oil” thing? It’s not the freshest of ideas any more, despite how pleasing it is to our patternseeking human brains.
The consensus is that the origin of this aphorism lies with mathematician and data scientist Clive Humby, in 2006. It’s found its way into a thousand pieces since then, probably most famously a 2017 report in The Economist that stated: “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”
Humby’s analogy is not a one-dimensional statement about the value inherent in the raw extractable resource, but that — like oil — unlocking greater value actually comes from refining and processing these resources.
Recently there have been critiques of this idea, including a 2019 article on Wired.com by contributor Antonio García Martínez. He climbs into the analogy, elbows flying, unpacking the notion of a “data dividend” proposed by people such as Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and California governor Gavin Newsom. The idea here is there should be some reciprocity from those that profit from user data, akin to the policy that sees a small share of cash funnelled back to Alaskans according to the state’s petroleum revenues.
Martínez rejects the analogy saying that data is not “liquid” and fungible like oil, that the third-party data traders will be legislated against and lobbied out of the way by giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Google.
His article is really a critique of the model of such firms. He concludes: “No, data isn’t the new oil. And it never will be, because the biggest data repositories don’t want it to be.”
He is probably right. Actually, I don’t know. I have never fancied myself capable of fortune telling.
He’s a tech bubble survivor and entrepreneur with a yacht. I’m a tech journo with yachting ambitions and canoe budget. Still, I do say he missed a significant distinction: there are actually two types of e-oil here — private user data and public data. Legislating against selling my private user data is a little like saying, “Hey, you should not be the only one to profit from the petrol you just siphoned out of my car.” Fair enough, right?
But public data should be a different category, and it is valuable in a different way.
Which brings me back to today. In SA, we are missing the data boat. Our public data collection is haphazard and patchy. Our last census was 2011. If I tried to use a figure from that study in a piece of journalism now it would be thrown out by a savvy editor as so outdated as to be useless. With the volume and speed of data creation and collection increasing exponentially, a nine-year gap is a bigger deal than it was last century.
We do have some pockets of excellence in terms of open and public data. Comparative tools such as the Open Budget Index ranks our Treasury’s budget process as one of the most transparent in the world. But in other departments and at other levels there is not just a lack of skill but also a lack of willingness to participate.
And despite being a member of the Open Governments Partnership, we’ve been failing to update and submit for a few years now. In February it declared us “under review”.
On the civil society and civic technology side there are local heroes and hero projects, such as OpenUp Wazimaps election data, but their efforts are sometimes hindered by (the government’s) non-systematic approach, no national data formats, or standards.
I know a census is a huge, expensive undertaking, and I know why that hasn’t been a priority for SA, but rich data would have been particularly useful in 2020.
Granular and timely data is being used to track and combat the coronavirus pandemic. In the US, for example, IBM and the weather service are collaborating on a project that will see them break new infections down to the postcode. That way, governments and health-care providers can plan better, but they can also alert citizens to increased risks directly applicable to them.
The government is not the owner of public data but its custodian, and when we have space to breathe again a national directive to clarify public data policies would go a long way. Moreover, imagine if we could see the level of public-private collaboration evidenced in this pandemic being applied to the matter of public data.
The countries moving up the data value chain are not just collecting data, they are transforming it, understanding it and opening it up.
If we don’t scramble, and soon, I fear we will find ourselves once again on the wrong end of a resource’s value chain.
GRANULAR AND TIMELY DATA IS BEING USED TO TRACK AND COMBAT THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
WHEN WE HAVE SPACE TO BREATHE, A DIRECTIVE TO CLARIFY PUBLIC DATA POLICIES WOULD GO A LONG WAY