A guest post from Joel Gurin of the Center for Open Data Enterprise

On Friday May 29 at 10:30, Andrew Stott, Maurice McNaughton, and I will lead an Action Track session on realizing the economic value of open data. While open data can boost economic growth in many ways, including through good government, improved education, and better public services, our session will focus on private sector uses of open data. Companies are applying open data to do much more than build new apps: They are developing new businesses, new ventures, and new jobs. We’re seeing this trend in countries all over the world, with businesses operating in all sectors of the economy.

As the business potential of open data becomes clear, however, so do the obstacles to applying it. Open data from government sources is often too incomplete, unreliable, or difficult to access to be a strong business driver. A recent World Bank study showed that in some parts of the world, as few as 15 percent of data-driven companies use government data, with the rest developing data from customer business transactions, crowdsourcing, or other sources. Conversely, some other countries have invested heavily in developing high-quality open data and open data portals, only to find that potential business users either don’t know the data is there or don’t know how to apply it.

Too often, open data providers and data-driven businesses are like ships passing in the night. Government ministries want their data to be put to good use, but don’t know who is using it now and who might apply it in the future. Data-focused companies, on the other hand, want better, more accessible data, but don’t know who to contact in government to improve data quality. We need to bring government data providers together with their data users to identify the greatest opportunities and the most important areas for data improvement.

At the Center for Open Data Enterprise we run a series of Open Data Roundtables, originally launched as an initiative of The GovLab at NYU, that bring U.S. government agencies together with businesses that use their data. Our sessions with the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, and Transportation, among others, have helped create new public-private sector dialogues around open data. These Roundtables are helping to identify strategies that government agencies can use to improve critical datasets and ways that companies can help disseminate government data as well.

We believe that this same model of public-private sector dialogue can be applied internationally. In that spirit, we hope that Friday’s session at the conference will bring together government officials and businesses to begin some productive discussions.