First ‘Things’ First

First ‘Things’ First

I was pleased to see the recent post by the ODI on the open-shared-closed data spectrum since it resonates with the challenges faced at OpenSensors. To date most of our commercial projects have been at the private end of the spectrum; they are challenging, they are innovative, but they are often not ingesting open data or publishing data as an exhaust.

Are we worried about private IoT messaging? Not too much. Most of our private clients choose to get their own house in order first, after all typically there’s a lot of opportunity to juice existing sensors. First ‘things’ first as they say.

The good news is these deployments are sowing the seeds of sharing behaviours by distributing content internally, releasing data that used to terminate and die. They are unlocking data and distributing for access via API for dashboards, data science and decision support, which is the first step on a journey to openness.

So as a tech company how do we lead our clients and help them deliver open data strategy? We provide the tools to allow organisations to manage data entitlements pushing themselves up the data spectrum to become open. Each of our clients will make their own journey to open up their content, our job is to deliver infrastructure allowing them to manage data at a privacy that works for them.

This is important stuff. IoT tech companies are developing the smart city data network, and we don’t want it to be private. We want pain free navigation from edge to edge of our urban data grid, whilst feeling secure and confident about the data we consume. Our platforms must secure data whilst facilitating its exchange and entitlement control, so what’s needed to make smart city data exchange a reality? A couple of things spring to mind, we need to …

Evolve Topics and Communities – Expect faster adoption of sharing behaviours within trusted communities. By curating communities with shared interests expect adoption of localised data exchange, say amongst tenants of a commercial property. Communities sharing data should ease the path to universal open data.

Evolve Exchange Mechanisms – Transparent pain free data exchange is key to delivering a functionally rich lean IoT data infrastructure, the alternative could be akin to a ‘european data mountain’ of needless and costly sensor deployments.

Building the tech stack for these needs is plenty of work, so as we define the business and technical models for IoT we need to act responsibly. Deploying and decommissioning software is cheap, just a couple of mouse clicks away. IoT deployments are very real, they consume natural resource, risk cluttering our environment and can loiter well past their usefulness.

Encouraging sharing behaviour within IoT through lean shared infrastructure will prevent waste. The alternative would be a legacy of urban junk, we made a mess of space by not decommissioning hardware, lets not do the same with our urban environment and keep it open and centred on communities.