Yesterday I was at Over the Air, the UK mobile hack day, where developers come together
and try to build mobile apps and projects, commercial and open source. (I worked on
something Wikimedia-related, more of which when I've made the code presentable.)
One of the things discussed was the perennial topic of opening up of UK government data.
The UK government have committed to making as much data as possible openly available under
open licenses (specifically the Open Government Licence, which is basically the UK
government's rebadged CC BY license).
The UK government are trying to seed use of data with companies, to show an economic and
social use for opening up data, and are prioritising open data releases that have some
useful economic benefit. For instance, hypothetically, releasing high-quality information
about public transport would allow people to develop mobile apps to help people use public
transport, while releasing data about bird population studies might be of less commercial
importance. The government seem to be leaning towards putting out the commercially useful
material first.
One thing that came up in discussion was whether or not anyone has ever done any economic
impact studies on Wikipedia and other community-produced open data and open content
projects (OpenStreetMap, other Wikimedia projects etc.)? If civic society groups like
Wikimedians, OpenStreetMappers,
MySociety.org people etc. want to convince governments to
put more data out, it'd be helpful to show the economic effects of this, or to have
people who are trying to convince government to put the data out to have access to this
kind of information so they can make better decisions (cue cynicism here).
There are such reports on the economic impact of open data releases by governments[1]. But
I was wondering if we'd seen anything for community-produced data. I know Apple are
now using OpenStreetMap within iPhoto[2] and have long had Wikipedia as part of OS X's
Dictionary.app. The Foursquare website has just switched over to OSM (the iOS and Android
apps both still use Google Maps).
Obviously, the success of Wikipedia has affected the previously dominant players in the
encyclopaedia market: Britannica, Encarta, World Book etc. But it is also providing all
sorts of much harder to see effects by reducing costs for businesses and organisations.
The BBC reuse Wikipedia content within their music and wildlife websites, thus reducing
the amount they have to pay for content (or, more charitably, enabling them to do projects
that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do). Wikipedia makes Google more useful, and
Google have often said "anything that makes the web better makes Google better".
Might a decent Wikipedia in a small language effect the market in that language community
for technology? If people can actually read stuff in language X, does that increase the
demand for computers/mobile phones/Internet access in language X speakers?
Has there been any studies of these kinds of economic impact of Wikimedia projects and
other open content/open data projects?
I have seen some discussion of this in the OSM community.[3] Unfortunately, Google is
failing me on searching for material on the economic impact of Wikipedia: I just get lots
of Wikipedia articles with titles of the form "Economic impact of X". I also
couldn't find anything on the Research Index section of Meta.
My eventual interest in this is whether or not there are potential ways governments could
work with projects like Wikipedia, chapters like WMUK and with individual volunteers as
part of their open data strategy: they seem to want to do likewise with commercial
organisations because of the obvious economic benefits that some of that data has.
There's potential for a kind of three-way thing, with governments working with both a
commercial partner and with a community partner (like a Wikimedia chapter) to produce
symbiotically beneficial data.[4]
[1] see
http://wiki.linkedgov.org/index.php/The_economic_impact_of_open_data
[2]
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/4/2998428/apple-iphoto-ios-openstreetmap-cre…
[3]
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2010-September/053947.html
[4] I hate myself when I write sentences like that.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>