Republished from Laura James at OKF:

“The Open Knowledge Foundation believes in open knowledge: not just that some data is open and freely usable, but that it is useful – accessible, understandable, meaningful, and able to help someone solve a real problem.

A lot of the data which could help me improve my life is data about me – “MyData” if you like. Many of the most interesting questions and problems we have involve personal data of some kind. This data might be gathered directly by me (using my own equipment or commercial services), or it could be harvested by corporations from what I do online, or assembled by public sector services I use, or voluntarily contributed to scientific and other research studies.

This data isn’t just interesting in the context of our daily lives: it bears on many global challenges in the 21st century, such as supporting an aging population, food consumption and energy use.

Today, we rarely have access to these types of data, let alone the ability to reuse and share it, even when it’s my data, about just me. Who owns data about me, who controls it, who has access to it? Can I see data about me, can I get a copy of it in a form I could reuse or share, can I get value out of it? Would I even be allowed to publish openly some of the data about me, if I wanted to?

But how does this relate to open data? After all, a key tenet of our work at the Open Knowledge Foundation is that personal data should not be made open (for obvious privacy reasons)!

However there are, in fact, obvious points where “Open Data” and “My Data” connect:

* MyData becomes Open Data (via transformation): Important datasets that are (or could be) open come from “my data” via aggregation, anonymisation and so on. Much statistical information ultimately comes from surveys of individuals, but the end results are heavily aggregated (for example, census data). This means “my data” is an important source but also that it is essential that the open data community have a good appreciation of the pitfalls and dangers here – e.g. when anonymisation or aggregation may fail to provide appropriate privacy.

* MyData becomes Open Data (by individual choice): There may be people who want to share their individual, personal, data openly to benefit others. A cancer patient could be happy to share their medical information if that could assist with research into treatments and help others like them. Alternatively, perhaps I’m happy to open my household energy data and share it with my local community to enable us collectively to make sustainable energy choices. (Today, I can probably only see this data on the energy company’s website, remote, unhelpful, out of my control. I may not even be able to find out what I’m permitted to do with my data!)

* The Right to Choose: if it’s my data, just about me, I should be able to choose to access it, reuse it, share it and open it if I wish. There is an obvious translation here of key Open Data principles to MyData. Where the Open Definition states that material should be freely available for use, reuse and redistribution by anyone, we could think that my data should freely available for use, reuse and redistribution by me.”

We think it is important to explore and develop these connections and issues. The Open Knowledge Foundation is therefore today launching an Open Data & MyData Working Group. “