Thank you.
I think there are two questions there, really, that are related to my research. One of the arguments that I made in some of my written work around open government data in the U.K. is trying to analyze how open government data policy connects into the U.K. government's open public services policy, which is really an effort to further marketize public service provision in the U.K., opening up provision to the third and private sectors.
What I was doing there was thinking about the ways that open data fits into that agenda. It is quite explicitly laid out within the policy, but in terms of how the data can be used by business intelligence—analysts, for example—to see where there might be profitable public services to bid and run and things like that, and also in terms of this notion of the public service user as a customer of public services and being able to use open data based apps to make decisions on which services they ought to use.
The second part of the question is around societal risk and how open data might fit within that. One of the areas of open data release I've been looking at in some detail is the opening of weather data and how this fits in with efforts within the financial markets to develop weather derivatives products. These have been popular in the U.S.A. for a number of years and then spread elsewhere, and the U.K. financial markets want to be competitive with the U.S. markets.
Open weather data, as weather data is already open in the U.S.A., is very valuable for these financial market trades around weather derivatives. But they do have a very questionable impact upon climate change mitigation because basically when businesses are buying these products, they are essentially removing the financial impact of weather instabilities on their businesses. So it gives them less incentive to demand action on climate change mitigation. So there are various complex relations going on there that I think need to be thought about when we're looking at why different data sets have been released in different jurisdictions.
Thank you.