Yesterday was something of an odd watershed for the open government data movement. Uber, the private transportation giant that has done, in the main, whatever it damn well pleases in cities all over the world (though there has been a growing regulatory backlash) announced a data sharing partnership with the City of Boston.
There is a perverted inversion of power here. Usually it is cities that publish anonymized data. It happens daily, all over, in no small part because of the 8 Principles of Open Government Data, which has received renewed attention due to this article:
Even the URL is a stick in the eye: http://blog.uber.com/city-data.
As someone who helped draft those principles in Sebastopol one December weekend, I vividly recall the discussions of low-hanging fruit and the desire to stimulate activity. We were trying to form the backbone of government open data policies that could be accepted and implemented immediately. To lay down principles that were so slam-dunk simple that it would be impossible to argue.
And we were successful, as the explosion of data, activity (and my own job) attest.
So here we have a private company— one that has had what can only be described as an adversarial and disruptive relationship with municipal government— providing a trove of what can only be described as city data. Anonymized, back-dated, municipal data of great interest but limited market utility.