Good morning.
I want to start, in the same way as the other witness, by giving a little bit of extra context about me. I was instrumental in the U.K.'s rollout of open data, working in the Cabinet Office to write the initial policy and also doing the first 12 months of delivery and release of data.
To my mind, a political opportunity in open data has been created by the work and resolution at the G-8 for the G-8 open data charter, which was signed by all G-8 countries last year. This means that the biggest economies in the world will start releasing more and more data, and they're releasing more and more data in a way that is useful. They're releasing data around the core information assets, around such things as locations, times, environmental information, in a way that can be combined with other data sets and can also be combined across borders.
The first question this committee asked was what the value of this is. It's a huge opportunity. The McKinsey Global Institute published a report that put the value of this market at $3 trillion globally. Other reports cover smaller geographic regions and are of similar orders of magnitude. So the opportunity is enormous here.
The Open Data Institute, which I'm from, is a not-for-profit initially funded by the U.K. government. We were created to accelerate the benefits in the U.K. economy. We're here to bring economic, societal, and environmental benefits from open data, to answer the “so what?” question. We're here to make sure that there is some impact.
The way we do that is through training people, building capacity. We foster start-ups in our space. We have 10 open data start-ups as part of our program, employing 50 people—they were employing about 20 when they joined the program—and we convene academic, private sector, and public sector communities around particular problems and challenges and sectors.
In the last 18 months, because we've only been going 18 months—it's still a very new sector—we have a few examples of ways in which that $3 trillion number stands up. One of our observations was that there were a lot of enormous macro benefits and big numbers attached, and there were lots of tiny companies, but there was very little in the middle. So in the last 18 months we've worked with other people to identify £200 million cash savings in our National Health Service gross budget. We've mapped out the corporate structures of the investment banks in the U.S.A., drawing together information from three different regulators to provide insight in two months that none of those regulators had themselves. We've worked with the Bank of England, the major financial regulator in the U.K., to prove that you can take a data-rich, regulation-like approach to a market, in the new peer-to-peer lending market, which is now at $1 billion a year.
Many of these examples come from taking open data or data that was previously closed and combining. Many of the really interesting things happen at the intersection of open data and closed data, or open data and big data, or open data and personal data.
That leads into some of the questions you were asking. How are businesses approaching this? Are governments ahead of business? Well, they are, at the moment. This is one of the few sectors in which the government is slightly ahead of industry. Through our work of convening industry and through our corporate membership program, we talk to an awful lot of businesses about how they're approaching the open data challenge and how they view open data as an opportunity.
It feels as though the conversations we're having with them are very similar to the conversations people were having inside governments about five years ago. We're starting to see the first big businesses releasing open data as part of their business as usual.
There are some great examples from the U.K., often brought on by adversity. Tesco, one of the major retailers, is committed to publishing open data about every bit of own-brand food they create. They're doing that to show the consumers what they're eating so they can rebuild trust in their products.
One of our members, Telefonica, is looking to release some of the population data they know from the way mobile phones move around London during the day. We actually used that in one of our policy analyses to show the type of population in London and to show how that impacted on some of the resource allocation in public services and fire stations.
The next question you asked was around anonymization and how you can protect people's privacy in a landscape where open data is becoming ever more prevalent.
One of the organizations we're a member of is the UK Anonymisation Network. They do fantastic work to check people's work and they ask all of the questions around whether people have taken the right steps to protect people's privacy before any large data set is released. The £200 million savings that I mentioned earlier is drawn from a data set that contains every prescription written in England and Wales. That would possibly disclose personal information, but the NHS Information Centre has already taken the steps to check that they've done their anonymization well and also that it can then be checked by this peer-review process, the UK Anonymisation Network, through which statisticians check that all the right things have been done.
There is something called the open data barometer, which isn't quite large enough to be seen. You were asking how Canada compares to the rest of the world. Well, this is a nice visual representation of how Canada compares to the rest of the world on the release of data, particularly in terms of the data sets that are being requested and signed up to in the G-8. You can see that Canada is currently eighth in the world in the release of data. It has particular strengths for some of the core data that's being released, but it still has a little way to go on getting some of the social and economic benefits from the release of data.
I'd be very happy to send a link to this site to the committee so that everybody can see it.
In terms of how Canada could move up in the rankings and what my ideal ask would be, I think there are a couple of core data sets that could be usefully examined as to whether or not they could be released. We've done some work to try to make it easy for people to build services on the back of open data. An awful lot of work has gone into the technical standards around data release, and the previous witness talked about that.
We've put some work into the social side of data release. If you believe that open data is a raw material for the digital age, then as is the case with any raw material, you care about certainty of supply, you care about how often you're going to get a release, and you care about how much time and effort people will put into customer engagement, talking to you about how you use the data and what things are important to you. That's something we've tried to codify with open data certificates. We've given that away to the world.
The final thing I would leave you with is that this is a global market. It would be great if we could start tackling some of these challenges globally.
Thank you very much.