Well it's been a while.. What's changed?

As the title indicates, it's been far too long since I last wrote a post. Terrible I know.

A lot has changed since my last post. I've moved to a new role responsible for B2B Marketing products. My focus is now very much on helping SMEs grow and cut the risks associated with this.

This lends itself superbly to the aims of the Open Data movement which is reaching a major milestone this week.

On Tuesday 29th October, the Open Data Institute held their first annual summit to celebrate the first 12 months of this superb organisation. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend but followed the event closely on Twitter using the tag #ODIsummit.

The major announcement made was the formation of 13 global 'nodes' to help further the cause and bring the collaborative way of working between data owners, start-ups and society to a wider audience. These new nodes include two national trials in the USA & Canada, eight regional/city nodes in Dubai, Chicago, North Carolina, Paris, Trento, Manchester, Brighton and Leeds. The final 3 nodes are 'communication' nodes in Gothenburg, Moscow & Buenos Aires.


What this means is that the Open Data movement is growing and supporting more businesses to take advantage of this fantastic resource.

Coming up later this week (in fact, starting on the 31st October) is the 2013 London Summit of the Open Government Partnership. This event will bring together world leaders from the 60 member nations (and me!) to discuss topics including Open Data and the move towards open government, governance (if you want to know the difference, ask a Geographer or social scientist!) and greater transparency.

I'll be there manning the Open Data User Group stand and talking about our work to bring together data users and publishers to ensure that the UK Government release the data that can have the greatest economic & social impact. I hope that the event will encourage other member countries to do more to think about what data they release, how they release it and how they ensure it is of good quality.

We also expect the UK to announce the first draft of our National Information Infrastructure which will set out the key future releases which have been voted as the most important by the community via the data.gov.uk website. I personally have my fingers crossed for an open address file to finally give every other dataset a core reference point.

I'll try and log some updates through the two days of the OGP Summit here and on Twitter (@PaulMalyon).

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