Measuring the value of data reuse

From Open NZ Wiki

Clifton ran through his research (see his post regarding this session on the SSC's blog):

• District of Columbia competition calculates the cost savings to the 'state' by estimating how much it would have cost for the 'state' to create the applications entered.

• The EU use a number of ways to estimate the value of the market
  • crowdsourcing : data re-users are asked to estimate
  • turnover : turnover of the data re-users, less the cost of acquiring the data
    • possibly from the data alone,
    • even total company turnover
    • also less money received by the data suppliers
  • income : income received by the data suppliers
  • staff : the number of people employed by the data re-users

Conversation/discussion kicked up:

• secondary and tertiary re-users add value too, and maybe add more value than the primary re-users.
  • e.g.these people clean-up and aggregate with other sources
• CRI tensions
• public good hard to value
• measure downloads; use/demand is proxy for value
• in the UK charging can become a barrier; not just in the obvious cost way; but because it take money to retain a reuse unit, the unit also adds a lower limit on the quantum of data that they will handle/give-out.
  • charging can be used to restrict the volume of data requests
• make the data free, but charge for the 'value add' to understand the data.
• difficulty in putting a value on democratic value
  • democracy requires transparency
• marginal cost of giving/selling data low compared to cost of collection.
• Charging for or giving data away may actually raise the quality of data collection - as agency profits
  • positive incentive for agency
  • finding the right incentive for agencies the key
• default open data may add cost
  • as everthing has to be vetted (guy fron NZDF said this)
  • I would have thought that it would actually lower the cost of running the OIA structure inside an agency

• another way to measure value, though not explicitly stated was to measure the cost of collection.

Also see Economic Benefits of Open_Data.

-- Clifton Chan 02:03, 2 September 2009 (UTC)