Open data in the arts: an introduction

We’re big on openness at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab. Prior to my position as the Geek in Residence, I helped build an open platform – as part of a two-person team – that found wide use in places as diverse as schools in Bangladesh, charities in Colombia, the Australian government and the World Bank. We couldn’t have made it happen without the product spreading through open means, and I strongly believe that similar approaches can help arts organizations like the Edinburgh festivals grow larger audiences, understand more about their demographics, find new ways to bolster their revenue and foster interesting new collaborations. In this series of blog posts, we’ll be discussing open data from the festivalslab point of view, in the hope that we can contribute to a useful conversation in the arts sector as a whole.

Open data sounds like a much more techie concept than it really is. It’s really a way to let third parties plug into and spread your organization’s information, in a way that you control, and allows them to create publications, products and services that you don’t have the time, resources or inclination to develop or maintain. You become the centre of a creative ecosystem – something arts organizations, and especially festivals – are already brilliant at. It’s a perfect fit.

More verbosely, open data takes the valuable information that an organization already owns and turns it into a product in itself, free of any specific form or function. Usually this is as a kind of database that third parties can query and automatically incorporate into their products. You can think of open data as a public, read-only interface directly into the parts of your data that you want other organizations to get hold of – and, in fact, as the easiest, cheapest way to share that information. You might want to do this in order to ensure the accuracy of the information as it spreads across the web, for promotional reasons, to stimulate an ecosystem of third party developers, publishers, creatives and private companies around your products or services, because you believe making the data available is the right thing to do – or a combination of any of these things. One other good reason is that if you don’t release your data in this way, someone else might do it for you – and you may well want to retain control, in order to maximize usefulness for the public, enforce your ownership, and keep track of who’s using it.

One of an arts festival’s most valuable sets of data (although by no means the only one in its possession) is its listings information. By making it available as open data, the festival can allow third parties to incorporate accurate listings – and have corrections,changes and cancellations filter down into the ecosystem almost instantly. 

Better yet, they can ensure that these third-party listings link to the official ticketing page in order to drive awareness and revenue, and they can also retrieve detailed information about how it is used. This is because while the data is open, it isn’t public domain; that is to say, the festival retains complete ownership and licenses the information to the third parties who use it. That license can force the party to authenticate whenever they ask for information, resulting in a detailed set of user information from across the festival ecosystem that could be aggregated to infer demographic information, trends in audience attention, and environmental details like geographic location. The license can also impose restrictions on how the data is used. It could require that applications include a copyright statement, for example, or a link back to the festival’s homepage as part of each listing.

Many arts organizations already use forms of open data: they might publish an RSS feed, for example, or push information through a Twitter account. News feeds are a great example of data which has no prescribed form, and some 80% of Twitter traffic occurs via that service’s open data interfaces. (Think about it: if you use Twitter, do you generally prefer to use the website, or an app like Twitter for iPhone, Hootsuite, Seesmic or Tweetdeck?) However, embracing a full query-able open data interface provides a whole new set of functionality. What about apps that seek out disability-friendly events? Or that allow users to learn more about the life and historical context of a particular theatre company, musician or arts practitioner? Or that provide simple recommendations based on a user’s declared interest and likes in the social media profiles they already have?

In our next post, we’ll do a little more blue sky thinking, and make some more suggestions of what might be possible with open data to get your creative juices flowing.

[thank you to Monica's Dad for sharing your images via flickr Creative Commons]