Engaging Data Initiative

The First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information will take place next month in Cambridge, MA. It is part of the Engaging Data initiative recently launched by the MIT SENSEable City Lab which seeks to address the issues surrounding the application and management of personal electronic information. The goal of the forum is to:

To explore the novel applications for electronic data and address the risks, concerns, and consumer opinions associated with the use of this data. In addition, it will include discussions on techniques and standards for both protecting and extracting value from this information from several points of view: what techniques and standards currently exist, and what are their strengths and limitations? What holistic approaches to protecting and extracting value from data would we take if we were given a blank slate?

The event will gather participants from multiple domains, including watchdogs and activists (see Program and Speakers), to debate on the major challenges of exploiting personal electronic information (e.g. Mining the network, extracting social value from personal data, best practices and standards, understanding the benefits versus expectations of users, …).

Why do I blog this: Lift lab is setting up a workshop for the Urban Labs gathering on the similar issues, with a practical focus, grounded on concrete projects (i.e. concrete datasets, concrete space of action, concrete actors). Beyond its many merits, I find the name of the “Engaging Data” initiative rather misleading, as we need to go beyond the stage of using data to engage. Taking the parallel with the many open data initiatives, after a rather short period excitement, there is now a need to measure the utility of exploiting these data (see Mesurer les résultats de la libération des données). Indeed, beyond the necessity to agree on the best practices, from transparent processes to the data protection, obfuscation and cloaking techniques, there will be soon a demand to prove their objective and subjective positive impacts (e.g. ROI, better awareness, improved services, improved public space design, quality of life). Now, the definition of criteria to measure this success is probably one outcome of the Urban Labs workshop.