Stimulating
growth in Taiwan’s start-up community through open data promotion
Taiwan is making a proactive and aggressive
push to become the Asia-Pacific region’s premier hub for open data innovation.
In this panel session, we will share Taiwan’s strategy to stimulate growth in
Taiwan’s start-up community through government promotion of open data. In an
effort to become a global leader in the field of open data, Taiwan is pouring
resources into education, training, and cooperation opportunities in order to
prepare the Taiwan public to be “open data literate.”
During the panel, Taiwan’s leading
tech-thinkers will share their strategies on how they plan to stimulate growth
in Taiwan’s creative economy through open data. These include, holding
competitions for both students and individuals to establish new business model
and start-ups using open data, continually increasing useful data sets on a
monthly basis, carry out international exchanges on open data, and find
corresponding business opportunities.
Background:
Status of Open Data Government Initiatives in Taiwan
The Taiwan government officially kicked off
its open data initiative in late 2012. Through the initiative, Taiwan hopes to
achieve a level of improved transparency in its operation, and more
importantly, stimulate innovation from the private sectors in applying open
datasets.
According to the high level policy setup by
Taiwan’s Board of Science and Technology (BOST) at the Executive Yuan, Taiwan’s
National Development Council (NDC) was placed in charge of coordinating the
supply of open data, while various government departments would begin to
release data to the public. The first data release began Q2, 2013. Each
government ministry is required to identify a minimum of 5 data categories in
the first trial phase (beginning March 2013), and 50 categories in the second
phase (which ended December 2013). By the end of 2014, more than 4,000 datasets
have become available on www.data.gov.tw.
For the demand side, a matching promotion
and subsidizing program has also been established by Taiwan’s Industrial Development
Bureau (IDB) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) in aiding the private
sector to develop creative applications that either promote the convenience of
citizens' daily life, or create business value which could yield economic gains
for the society as a whole. In all, this open data initiative would not only
bring Taiwan in line with other early proponents of open data like the US, and
the UK, but also establish Taiwan as a global leader in stimulating innovative
tech applications from the private sector. To promote development for both the
public and enterprise, the IDB has also created a series of campaigns and
competitions, to motivate students and citizens to learn more about open data,
creating a value add Taiwan’s open data initiative. Taiwan’s IDB has organized
a number of innovation and creation events for young people to generate their
own business ideas using open data.
With the support of the IDB, volunteers
from the private sector have also formed Taiwan’s Open Data Alliance (ODA),
which continuously provides suggestions or comments to the government from the
perspective of industry, and also acts as one of the major contact windows to
Taiwan’s domestic numerous open data communities.
Taiwan has also been actively collaborating
with global open data community, and has developed outstanding relationships
with many countries. Taiwan’s ODA has signed MOU’s with the UK Open Data
Institute, South Korea’s Open Data Center, GovLab in the US, Thailand’s
Electronic Government Agency, as well as continued exchanges with organizations
in Japan, Ireland, and France. We
believe Taiwan can become a regional hub for Open Data in the near future, and
Taiwan has ranked highly in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s “Open Data Global
Index”, ranking 11th worldwide.
Top-down
and Bottom-up open data strategies in Taiwan
Throughout our panel session, we will share
Taiwan’s experience in both top-down and bottom-up strategies in promoting open
data. Numerous countries have begun to promote open data, anticipating that
open access to government data can achieve the transparency of democratic
governance and promote citizen participation and cooperation. The knowledge
economy, coupled with statistical analyses of large amounts of data, have
stimulated personal, industry, and government motives for reusing data,
particularly to conduct innovative research and development or related
services. This has created potential business opportunities for transforming
data into knowledge services.
However, a kind of “soy paste vat” culture
is deeply ingrained in many Asian countries, where non-transparency provides
those in power with the substantial advantage of being able to maintain control
of the flow of information. But over the last two years, the vitality of
Taiwan’s open data advocacy community has enabled Taiwan to become a foremost
leader in Asia, pushing Taiwan to use open data fully and diversely.
Taiwan’s Open Data Alliance (ODA)
established by more than 300 ICT members in 2013, and was created to promote
the reuse of open data in the industry. The ODA’s mission includes sharing
information, integrating resources, and cooperating with business. The ODA collects and learns about industry
requirements, and then divulges what they learned to Taiwan’s government. The
ODA also promotes international cooperation, as well as promote open data
services and applications that serve industry and the public.
Over the last year, the ODA and the Taiwan government
have created a good model for public-private partnership. Pushing the
government to disclose data is a manifestation of soft power, and enable the Taiwan’s
youth to petition the government and accelerate reforms through the use of
data. Furthermore, disclosing data can
create job opportunities and economic output. If the government does not
actively disclose data, Taiwanese youth cannot be trained in handling the new
wave of international data, hurting Taiwan’s global competitiveness.
Author:
Dr. Chi-Ming Peng, Chairman of Taiwan Open Data Alliance
