The city of Copenhagen recently launched a for-profit data marketplace combining city data with private data. The City Data Exchange is a software-as-a-service platform that promises to eliminate silos and coordinate all parties working on the challenges of sustainability and city life.
Lord Mayor Frank Jensen told Computer Weekly he wants Copenhagen to be a civic tech efficiency hub. He also said the marketplace is part of the city’s efforts to be the first carbon neutral capital by 2025.
Currently, the raw data from the city and its vendor partners is available to customers that pay subscription and service fees. According to materials from Hitachi Insight Group, which developed The City Data Exchange, public/private data marketplaces are coming because the private sector seeks to generate and monetize new and unique data sources.
Copenhagen’s data marketplace is certainly interesting because it is the first city to put a price tag on its data--at least some of it--and create an interface with the goal of making city data easier to consume.
But, data marketplaces from the perspective of local governments in the United States are “not a mainstream topic yet,” said Jonathan Reichental, chief technical officer of Palo Alto, Calif. Reichental is an open data expert that has received a slew of technical awards and works with numerous industry organizations promoting civic tech leadership and development. Palo Alto launched its open data platform in 2012.
While there are about 90,000 public agencies in the U.S.--only a few hundred have open data platforms, he said. Monetizing open data “seems premature to me. We’re struggling with mayors to sign off on releasing data sets,” he said.
The biggest complaint about open data is what is currently available is often “garbage.” Data has to be clean and useful. Many governments are shy about pursuing open data because maybe they have other priorities, but they also may have a lack of confidence in their data, he said. It takes effort to make sure civic data sets are viable.
While things like java script augmentation of a city’s water data might be valuable to stakeholders, there are costs associated with that. Governments are not obligated to layer premium data services on top of data availability, he said. It’s not unreasonable to provide civic data in certain formats, he added, but converting data to alternative formats, producing visualizations and layering metadata are premium services. Palo Alto wouldn’t offer premium services today--the city would provide the data in the format it’s already in, Reichental said.
While a data marketplace could fund such premium services and perhaps spur innovation, there are policy implications to combining private and public data in marketplaces like Copenhagen’s, he said. The ownership and liabilities of combined data could be quite complex.
“Who wants to take on that challenge?”
As far as City Data Exchange by Hitachi Group, “the jury is still out on whether it’s going to work,” he said.
Hitachi Group did not return repeated requests for information on how many paid subscribers there are since its launch in May 2016.
