CoopMetrics

CoopMetrics is a nifty service for benchmarking a cooperative against its peers, and finding ways to improve. By pooling and comparing financial data cooperatives in a particular sector can find out what works, what doesn't, and good ideas spread faster.

• Details on the process: In summary, a co-op's accounts are mapped onto a standardized chart of accounts, quarterly trial balances are uploaded, and CoopMetrics crunches the data to provide various reports and comparisons. There are videos that give a sense of the steps involved.
• History: CoopMetrics traces its lineage back to 1996, with the CoCoFiSt ("Common Cooperative Financial Statements") program developed by Walden Swanson and Kate Sumberg.

This is a great example of organizations gaining an advantage by pooling information, and extracting insight that would otherwise be elusive.

Hat tip: Jim Johnson

Happy October 1!

October is Co-op Month, with lots of fun Co-opy stuff going on. If all goes on schedule, by this time next year, the Data Commons Cooperative should be emerging from a warm nest of feasibility studies and market analysis to spread its wings and take flight. The cooperative is intended as a way to sustain our work long term, but we'll be excited to work with principled organizations of all kinds.

Happy October!

UK Open Government License

Version 1.0 of the UK's Open Government License has been released, as developed by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (good to see a stationery office that thinks beyond paperclips and printer paper!) It is similar to a Creative Commons attribution license with some added bits. Press release here - choice quote:

Commenting on the launch of the new licence, Lord McNally, Minister for The National Archives and Public Sector Information, said: 'The National Archives isn't simply a repository of our nation's history, its task is to bring information to life, make it accessible and enable its re-use. This innovative licence gives everyone the opportunity to create products and services which benefit society.'

update: there's some information from Beth Brook about why the Open Government License was developed, rather than using a Creative Commons license. In summary: they wanted a single license that covered both copyright and database rights, covering all UK jurisdictions, and which was as simple as possible (rather than having a simple summary but complex legal language).

update 2: post on data.gov.uk about the license encouraging use of the license by local authorities.

update 3: analysis from eaves.ca on how this positions the UK.

Rooted economy directories

The growing list of rooted economy directories in this blog's sidebar is now a package in CKAN. CKAN is an open registry of data and content packages. You can download the directory list as a CSV file.

• http://ckan.net/package/rooted-economy-directories

We maintain the list using Coopy, an experiment in distributed data collection.

"Have you and a colleague ever ended up with two versions of the same spreadsheet, with a mess of independently-made changes that now need to be merged? Coopy makes that problem go away."

Coopy applies the fossil distributed version control system, normally used for software development, to the problem of data collection.

More funding!

The DCP has received a grant for tech development from the Cooperative Charitable Trust (founded by Bob Giel). Thanks very much!

Funding!

We have just received word that an application submitted back in February to fund organizational and business development of the Data Commons Cooperative has been approved. We now have the means to really research what services we can provide to whom at what cost to become a sustainable democratic business. For our early adopter data sharing organizations, this is the time to get to the nitty gritty! More details -- and ways to help us figure this out -- coming soon.

Private organization, open data

Infochimps has a post about the pros and cons of opening data, from the perspective of a private organization (as opposed to governments, which have been getting a lot of attention recently). Infochimps is a nifty site:

We’ve been working since the start of 2008 to build the world’s most interesting data commons, and since the start of 2009 to build the world’s first data marketplace.

Have your cake and eat it

Does your so-called open data pass the cake test? Can you have a baker put a picture of it on a cake for you? If you can't figure this out in a minute or two (hmm, the baker profits commercially, and redistributes, is that ok?) then the data isn't very open, is it? (Here's the original post, in Spanish)

API versus downloadable dataset

There's an interesting discussion on Nat Friedman's blog about API versus downloadable data. Lots of new data sources are popping up online that wrap up their databases in a nice friendly fashion, which is great, but sometimes it would be very useful to cut out the middleman and grab the databases directly. Mark Colburn brings up some reasons to prefer an API, including clarity of provenance, reliability of data, and maintaining control over updates.

The open data movement

A short inspirational talk from Tim Berners-Lee at TED: the year open data went worldwide. He gives real-world examples of open data making a difference to people's lives, from avoiding bicycle accidents to recovery in Haiti.