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(lift)

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(lift 12 - Feb 24 2012 - Geneva)

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(Rufus Pollock - Stories)

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[Rufus Pollock] Just to say for those of you who don't know:

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the Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit -- not for profit

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founded in 2004

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and which builds tools and communities

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to create, use and share open information

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and that's information that anyone can use, reuse and redistribute.

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(missed words: "and as such"? check) we've been working on Open Data for quite a long time,

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since we started in 2004.

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And today, I want to start this story by going back in time 5'000 years,

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to ancient Mesopotamia.

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There, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers,

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flourished the Sumerian civilization.

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And they were confronted by a problem.

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They were confronted by the limitations of human memory

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in the recording of taxes, food and other goods.

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And those ancient civil servants and businessmen hit on a novel solution:

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What they decided to do was they would start counting things with small clay chips,

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which they would bake inside of a clay -- a little clay box

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and then mark, on the outside of that box, what they were counting.

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You know, was it grain, was it tax payments, whatever.

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And so, born out of necessity for a state and a society,

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came one o the great information technology revolutions of all time: writing.

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The Sumerians invented writing via cuneiform.

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And if we fast-forward from that a few thousand years, we come to the UK census.

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Again, it's always interesting that states governments are often at the forefront

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of at least driving information technology and information systems innovations.

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The UK census: again, the state that it is in during the Napoleon Wars.

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Desire to count the population more accurately:

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we have the first UK census in 1801.

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And in the US, they also had censuses, in fact starting in 1790.

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And one of the problems encountered in the 1880 census

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was they tabulated the census by hand.

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And by the 1880 census, it was taking seven years to tabulate the census.

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So often you got -- take the 1880, it wasn't until 1887 they actually had any data they could use.

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And they calculated that for the next census in 1890,

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they wouldn't be finished by 1900.

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They still wouldn't have the results of the census by the time they started the next one.

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They had a crisis of information technology.

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And what they went and did is they commissioned Owen (check) Hollrith

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to build the first automatic tabulator.

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And for those of you who know your company history, of course,

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Owen (check) Hollrith company went on to be one of the founders,

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if you like, one of the companies that came and created IBM. (2:38)

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And IBM, by the sixties, were building their -- they replaced those hand --

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those kind of wooden tabulators with this stuff:

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digital tabulators, the modern computer of this age

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and again, much of this -- I don't know if you guys know --

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IBM would have gone bankrupt

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if it hadn't been for Franklin Roosevelt passing the Social Security Act in the States,

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which necessitated (check) a huge amount of new tabulation.

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So, again, a lot of innovation in this space came out of government need

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and also, of course, the nuclear program,

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the other great needer of computer power.

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And today, today, we find ourselves again in the midst of a revolution.

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It's a revolution driven by two needs:

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one that has been the same throughout the histories I've just shown,

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information complexity, which is the necessity,

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and information technology, which is the opportunity.

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And what we're doing in this case is a policy innovation, if you like.

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We're innovating by opening up information. (3:36)