They gave us Lady Gaga; we gave them the Open Government Data Camp

Where did the idea for an open data camp come from?

Did Obama Just Copy Us?

At the Open Knowledge Foundation copying is in our DNA. The whole point of what we do is to make it free, fast and easy for people to use and share lots of stuff, for any purpose, without having to ask permission. Obviously not what economists call 'rivalrous' stuff like bicycles, shoes, or shortbread (we're not the Open Stealing Foundation), but 'non-rivalrous' digital stuff like electronic documents, images and datasets. The OKF is predicated on the idea that there are lots of advantages to opening up a plethora of digital material for anyone to copy – from publicly funded research, to public sector information, to works that have entered the public domain. People in our various working groups are busy trying to apply legal and technical approaches from projects like Apache, Wikipedia and Open Street Map to fields as diverse as climate science, chemistry, history, linguistics and librarianship.

For over a year we've been planning a big event for people interested in opening up government information. As Datablog readers will well know, there has recently been a huge wave of interest and activity in this area, from Calgary to Zaragoza, Moscow to Nairobi, Lichfield to Helsinki. Over the past few months, we've been busy finalising arrangements to fill a big room with as many movers, shakers, stakeholders and pioneers as possible. So far we've got representatives from over 30 countries, and buy-in from everyone from the UN to the W3C to the Norwegian government to the good folks at the Guardian.

Rather than having formal presentation after presentation, we're setting everyone up with lots of space, lots of flip charts and lots of coffee for two days of plotting, hacking, planning and discussion around what the next few years will look like. What are the obstacles to opening up information in different countries? What kind of technologies do we need to support the next generation of digital services that use public information? How can we build consensus around what 'open government data' means? What exactly do we mean by 'raw data'? What are the most compelling examples of applications using open government data? And so on, and so on.

So you can imagine that we were deeply and pleasantly surprised to see the US government announce last week that they will be organising a remarkably similar event on a remarkably similar date. Ours is called Open Government Data Camp (OGDC), theirs is called the International Open Government Data Conference (IOGDC). Ours is on the 18-19th November 2010 in London, theirs is just before ours (hence, "the first event of its kind") on the 15-17th November 2010 in Washington. Is this a big coincidence? Or did Obama just copy us?

Back in September I spoke to the US's first Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, one of the big pioneers in this area who is leading Obama's open government agenda, and he said he loved the idea of the event (in retrospect: hmm...), and that he would definitely come to London if he wasn't on a trip in India with the president. While I was vaguely ruminating on the idea that the man I was speaking to might soon be heroically trekking through the Keralan junglescape with the world's most famous ex- Chicago Law Professor, he said I could even send a request to his office at the White House to see if they would be happy to be an official supporter of the event, which I promptly and proudly did. A few weeks later I was forlorn to learn that the office couldn't support the event and that Vivek could not attend "due to the scheduling constraints of budget season at this time". Since then there's been radio silence. Not a jot nor a tittle.

So what happened? Was the India story a cunning red herring to cover up the fact that Washington has been secretly planning a big OGD party for ages? Did the CIO really not know about the Washington event when I spoke to him? Had he forgotten – or did he just neglect to mention it? A brilliant case of cryptomnesia? Or did our event spur the United States Government into thinking that international open government data events were Probably A Good Idea and it was About Time they did one too, (and that it might be Pretty Neat if theirs was the first)? Stranger things have happened. In fact, copying good ideas is what makes the world of open government data what it currently is. Data.gov got there first and has spawned and is continuing to spawn an explosion of copycat open government data catalogues around the world – something which the US hasn't failed to pick up on. Tom Watson's 2008 Show Us A Better Way competition to build compelling applications with open government data influenced Apps for Democracy and countless other similar competitions around the world. Web applications and services such as mySociety's They Work For You, Hans Rosling's Gapminder, and 'hyperlocal' sites like EveryBlock have inspired web developers around the world to make similar sites for their own region or topic of interest. When advocates or civil servants in one country do something well, whether this is coming up with a good licensing strategy or doing an informative economic study on pricing models, interested parties in other places (hopefully!) start thinking about which bits they might be able to copy in their own country.

This is exactly what the OKF is trying to encourage: we think more copying of good ideas is a Very Good Thing. One of the purposes of our OGD Camp event later this month is to encourage stakeholders to swap good ideas like football cards.

So did Obama just copy us? Maybe, maybe not. We'll probably never know. It would be cool if he did.

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