103 #meta #data

Cross-post of my discussion with Philip Heltweg in November 2024. You can find the original article at heltweg.org under Meta Data: a series of interviews with the people behind open data.

As long-form transcripts, they are best enjoyed in a quiet hour with your favorite hot beverage. If you consider this project worthwhile, why not share it with a friend ;)

You can find an overview of all interviews at #meta-data.

In the following text, Philip's questions are highlighted in italics. Links to mentioned projects can be found in the footnotes. I have added a couple of photographs and videos in context of the discussion.

Background

Philip: Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Like what your self-described role basically is, how you see yourself?

Oleg: I see myself as a resident of the world, alive for something like 40 years. Hard to keep track at this point "over the horizon", as they say. The fact is that life is short, and I've been in Switzerland for just over half my life so far. I came here as a student in 2002, and started working quite a few years before that. My career began twenty-five years ago, when I started my first company and got into the Internet business back in Canada.

I'm proud to be a Canadian citizen, thankful for the inherited legacy, and to the community was there for me as an immigrant. My parents moved around a lot, about seven times in the space of 10 years, they moved house. Yeah, that happens to people who are migrants. We can never settle down. We have a hard time planting roots. For me, it has also been a long process. I have lived in the western and central parts of Switzerland, but I've also lived in the UK, and worked a lot with US companies and teams in India, and in Eastern Europe, and just all over the place.

It is really important for me to aspire to be a citizen of the world – not because I think globalization is a great thing, and we should all be consuming Starbucks lattes and McDonald's Quarter Pounders with cheese – but because of the fact, that the borders have been open to me. And that is something I'm just really thankful for. It's a privilege to be in Switzerland, which is such a tolerant and open country in at least for people like me, maybe not for everybody. So I came here about 20 odd years ago, and I studied, and I started my second step of my career, where I went from being this young aspiring entrepreneur to being an IT guy at the end of the valley.

I worked for really small local IT companies. I did consulting work for all kinds of projects, but a lot of just hardware repair, network infrastructure. And it was also at least partially pursued in my studies at the EPFL in Lausanne in communication systems. I'm still super fascinated by the topics of networking protocols and the systems of the Internet like IP and DNS, as well as radio frequencies and satellites and Internet of Things. So that was kind of what I was aspiring to learn when I came to Switzerland. And it's still what I continue to this day. Basically, trying to figure out how to make the world more open through the power of digital technology and the Internet.

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Okay, and you also were or are still very active in the Switzerland part of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Data, right?

Yeah. So the story is basically I was living in the UK at the time when I got involved with my first open data projects, which were mostly things like FixMyStreet, various crowdsourcing efforts to try to improve urban infrastructure, political appeals, at least trying to fix potholes and broken stuff everywhere.

Coming to Switzerland, the issues are a little bit less evident, but they are there. And so, I was very supportive of projects like Zuriwieneu, the FixMyStreet of Switzerland. And then also other early open data initiatives, mostly in the transportation area, so working on train schedules and mapping various roads and buildings. OpenStreetMap is obviously the largest project, but also lots of other mapping activities around it. I helped to start OpenData.ch ^[1](^#fn:1⁾, the official Swiss chapter of Open Knowledge, an organization which has quite a lot of reach – about 40 countries around the world in a very global organization. And throughout the these past years, since 2012 or so, I have been an active board member. I was involved with the open data strategy of this community, but also with all matter of projects at local, regional and national levels, getting a little bit into the politics of open data. Though I always know my place: I'm just the IT guy, right? I look after the infrastructure of the community, make sure people reset their passwords... But I do have quite a strong interest, and I think it also has a lot to do with being a foreigner in Switzerland, the fact I can't vote, but would like to have my say, right? Open data has been my way to get involved in, I think really an important change that's happening in society when all the administrative functions, every aspect of public and private life is affected by digitalization. The Open Knowledge Network is a really great platform to have some of that debate.

I have been very well-supported in having the privilege of being a tech ambassador of Switzerland to global institutions. Meaning that I would help to interpret the idea of open data, a foreign policy idea in many senses, which has much to do with developments in the USA and other countries. And also to interpret what was happening here in ways that our colleagues could understand. Being part of the network has been interesting and really a lot of fun.

Embracing Openness and Being Data Critical

It's basically a way for you to have your say or influence society, I would say, as someone who can't directly vote, but you can, influence society by making, for example, things visible in data that might need changing? Is that idea you had behind that?

There are two sides to that: one is there's the idea of my data, personal data, right? So we're all made of data, just like we're made of atoms, right? We have online identities that we would probably find ourselves very hard to dissociate with.

Now, if I was locked out of my account, let's say a hacker stepped in, kicked me out -- that would have a pretty big impact on my life, right? Especially if I was really confused about what to do. When you think about that, the psychology of identity theft. Why are we like that? Is it because we really live our digital lives, not just use them for marketing purposes? Some people manage to change their avatars and identities every week somehow -- but most of us are not James Bond of the Internet.

We stick to who we are and what we know. And protecting people's privacy and personal data online is a hugely important challenge. And it's a very difficult challenge because people say all kinds of shit. They spill their digital guts all over the Internet, and it doesn't take much of a hacker to pick up the pieces and throw it back into people's faces.

It seems we are living in a time of the scourges of ransomware, very personalized spamming, and the appearance of infinite fraudulent schemes. That is very concerning, and it is happening at different paces in different parts of the world. I think there's a lot we can learn from each other about that and together improve, in a sense, public awareness and create tools for people to actually protect themselves online.

It's like the idea of data literacy, making people more aware of how their data might be used, how they're visible?

I would say data literacy, to me, is, at least typically, more meant in a general context. I mean, something like a mixture of mathematics, statistics, and literature. It is reading the data section of the newspaper and being able to really understand the trends.

But also questioning the quality of the visualization or the analysis or the data itself. And being data critical is what I usually mean by data literate. But yes, there's definitely that aspect of being just vigilant about your online identity, staying safe on the Internet. And funnily enough, for many people, that is akin to being too shelled in. Being too protective of your data can actually be detrimental.

So if you're the tree in the middle of the forest, nobody hears you fall, right? If you create your digital bubble in such a way that you isolate yourself in the world that you never come out, take any risks. You don't go out of your comfort zone. You're safe in a way, but you're also fragile because you don't have a support structure.

Just like we have a social security system that helps us if we're unlucky in an accident or affected by a natural disaster, there are systems of digital resilience. They are maybe less visible and less understood. So I think data literacy is not just reading the data; it's also being pro-social. Being a social participant in these new digitized communities. Having your data out there is actually important for people to be able to recognize you as such and to support you in a way that you need. And I think that same argument extended to the institutional plane is what gives a fundamental reason for people to engage in open data as well.

My institution, my company, my government agency, my country should use the ability to publish data as a proactive measure, in a sense, to protect itself from the inevitable attacks and leaks and mishaps: to have trained personnel, who can not just update a web page, but can also look after the more sensitive and real-time aspects of our digital presence.

Whether these are analytics of visitors to your digital service or something more fine-grained like your financial transactions or community interaction support lines: the more you can embrace openness, the more you can be resilient. Especially when you're a part of an ecosystem of organizations and institutions that create self-healing platforms, where people step in to fill the gaps and where it doesn't matter so much what data you have, as much as what data you don't have.

What's the potential for data? Thinking forward rather than thinking backwards: especially now with this wave of extremely powerful AI services, it's in everybody's interest to be in control of their developing data presence and not just be accountable for data that's in the past.

Also enable everyone to access the data instead of only a few aggregators that might get the data from somewhere, buy it or something, and use it for their internal services? And instead, everyone should be able to participate in or have access to the data, right?

I mean, access to the value chain. So at some point you're participating in understanding some aspect of the world, some systemic element, and at some point you're interpreting these readouts, then you are questioning their value or trying to exploit them in some way. And the more people are participating in that, the bigger the potential ecosystem. Just like in a physical city, where you have institutions geographically in proximity, but also overlapping very much in terms of the laws they share, the partnerships they make, the everyday experience of having neighbors.

We have neighbors online. And some people really think we should have these metaverses or digital twins where we translate this physical reality into a virtual, simulated digital reality. I think that's all fun and everything, but it would be much better for us to actually acknowledge and understand the actual digital layers that create and shape our world. And this is the kind of digital literacy that I think we should really encourage. Understanding who governs domain names, how do these chains of trust work in terms of security, and ultimately, what is authentic? Being able to continuously demonstrate your existence by being a continual source of verifiable data.

That is what gives you today an identity online more than anything else. It doesn't really matter what platform or service you use. It's having those blips. Those blips keep coming, and when they stop coming, well: somebody might pay attention, hopefully notice that something is going on, maybe affecting you badly, step in and help.

I am not aware of there being something like an online ambulance. I was just talking to my wife about a story in the UK, west of where we used to live, about a man who died of a heart attack after waiting for an ambulance for nine hours. The worst thing was that an ambulance came after eight hours, which is already incredibly long for someone having a heart attack. And then they turned around and left because they had a more urgent case. You might die more from the insult than the injury when that happens. The poor guy. I don't know anything about this case, I imagine it took place far out in the countryside on a bad day, but it makes me think – what about digital ambulances? Do we even have such a concept? Could someone be sent to investigate?

If there wasn't data produced from you, checkup in an automated way? Or do you mean more in the "digital world"?

I think in the end the worlds are fused together, and it's increasingly hard to pick them apart. Our digital encounters are defined a little bit by the spaces we inhabit, for better or worse. I mean, there's a locality to networks. And as long as we're human beings existing in these bodies, that's just going to continue to be like that. Even if we can activate a computer halfway around the world and steer one of those telepresence robots around the room to talk to people in Antarctica, we still have our console, and the internet conditions of that console that define our operations, our remote operations, our remote experiences.

Despite all these promises of virtual reality and these amazing utopic promises of being fully immersed, you're never fully immersed. You're always present somewhere. There's always at least a geolocation as the most basic data point. And it's interesting. I'm yet to find a source of data that doesn't have a geographic quality to it somewhere. People sometimes say, this is not geodata. Well, no, it's geodata. Everything is geodata. Show me a data set that has absolutely no claim to any location. I don't think it exists.

I thought that recently as well, because we thought about how to categorize data in our research, or what attributes to put to data sets. And I thought, should you always have some location, for example, a relevance to some location in the world. And I was also struggling to come up with a data set that has no context that is geographical. It is interesting to think what is relevant for all data, basically.

Hacking Integration

But moving to the concrete project we talked about earlier. Speaking of digital participation in government, and with your background as an immigrant as well, you set up, or are participating, in this hack integration project in Switzerland ^[2](^#fn:2⁾.

Would you give a rough outline of what that is about and how you are involved?

Sure. Basically, I've been conscious of refugee issues for about eight or nine years. I think there was... There's definitely like a great amount of ignorance on my part. when I would meet people who have been through forced migration, I had a hard time even believing their stories. When I came to Switzerland, the country was coming out of the grips of a wave of intolerance towards refugees. Migrants from the Balkans, from the war in Yugoslavia that displaced a lot of people, and quite a few settled in Switzerland. And there were a lot of issues.

It was hard to ignore, but somehow I still didn't really see it. And I never saw my own family's displacement from the former Soviet Union as being forced. I mean, it was a case of seeking economic refuge, but I didn't really consider that to be politically motivated. I never sensed my family had been in any danger. So as I never thought of myself as a refugee and had a hard time accepting the stories of others at face value. But then, with time, I got to know more people. And in particular, I've been involved with the Powercoders initiative ^[3](^#fn:3⁾ from early on.

This is a technical bootcamp for refugees. The participants must be acknowledged refugees and having been in the country for several months, usually years, those would like to skill up in tech in particular web development skills, are offered a short program of about four months long. Afterwards they are placed in internships, usually quite locally. I've been supporting that project on and off, became a Powerteacher. I've coached and mentored and hired Powercoders over the years.

Through them, I learned about many more sides to the refugee experience, including the real meaning of trauma: try integrating when you are jumping at the sight of an airplane, or some kind of loud noise makes you disoriented. But, more vividly, this unconscious or semi-conscious dread of being not accepted, being out of place, which is sometimes related to a very real experience of being pushed back at the border or just not being very tolerated in the street or even not picked out for a project.

Two years ago, when the war in Ukraine began and there was another big wave of people arriving in Switzerland, mostly women, those situations really hit me in the face - because I was born in, not just in the former Soviet Union, I was born in Moscow and Russia was the enemy driving them to flee. At the beginning, I was really afraid because I didn't know much about this conflict. I mean, it's one of those things that you know without knowing. It's something you're ashamed about, and you just ignore it, and you just don't want to know.

You try to block it out of view, but it was a situation that completely divided my family, and it was just a wave of terror that almost overwhelmed me, so at some point I had to spring into action. So I spent most of 2022 and 2023 supporting refugees in my local community in Köniz. Just helping out with welcoming party stuff, offering to translate, applying what I remembered from growing up near a Ukrainian community. The whole aspect of cultural understanding, which goes beyond the level of language is more tricky. But, anyway, I did some translation and tried to help where I can. And one of the things I got involved in early on was job platforms.

We created a site where people could be matched to companies offering extra onboarding. We also set up, legal aid, medical aid, and organized training. There was a business network I helped out with, which aimed to support Ukrainian women to start a small business. And obviously, Powercoders was always there helping all refugees. A few Ukrainians also signed up, and we had some students at the University. I ended up working on the "Stand with Ukraine" online project, which was a national platform to help match people to housing. I was one of the programmers on that project and helped to maintain it, and finally to transfer it into custody.

That was a very transformative experience, through which I felt that I was managing to come a step closer towards making terms of my past. I've written extensively about this in my blog ^[4](^#fn:4⁾, exploring my family history. There's still a lot I need to get through. Wars divide people and families like nothing else; it's absolutely horrendous. It's still happening. It's still far from over. No matter what politicians say: this is a cleft, an injury that's going to take a generation or generations to heal. So we better start now. The talks about reconstructing Ukraine that have also been happening in Switzerland are a very important step. Even if it is not clear who supports that out of some kind of business interest, or out of humanitarian interest.

For me, it's more personal. I really, really hope to see some reconciliation within my lifetime. It happens in small ways every time I talk to a person from Ukraine, and they accept me as a human being; they don't accost me. They can punch me or slap me, or if they're angry with me, I can also stand and take the blame if needed.

The whole conflict is extremely tangled up. It's super hard to see it in black and white from here. The recurring question for me has been: how can I help? I've been doing Hackathons, they have been my thing ever since I was a 10-year-old kid going to programming contests. At some point, I started running unconferences, where people pitch problems or topics spontaneously and get sometimes very direct feedback. Someone goes and fixes their problem on the spot. From unconferences to hackathons, mostly first in California and then in the UK, at an increasing pace over the last decade in Switzerland.

I was thinking about how people could potentially benefit from hackathons if they're in a transitional period in their life. Transition being something one sees a lot at hackathons. Young people who are confused about their career options, people in between jobs, people who want to test the waters, just people who come with questions that are of a personal nature. We are not here just to solve the problem or experience the hackathon. I've seen that, and I've experienced enough gratitude from participants of hackathons I've organized, to see that there is more potential.

When I talked to Ukrainian tech friends about it, they said in Ukraine we do hackathons every week. "Yeah, the Ukrainian tech sector is really something. You should go and experience it." Something I really would love to do, go to an actual hackathon in Ukraine. But they were basically saying this is something we really enjoy doing. That was a lightbulb moment, so, of course, I started inviting more people to hackathons. They've been coming and supporting, and we had this idea of taking that a step further and making it a little bit more formal.

Take this idea of a civil society type hackathon primarily, without the whole prizes and the whole competitive factor... Especially if you've newly arrived in the country, you probably don't want to be put straight into a very competitive setting. So the civil society hackathons that are natural to the open data community, they relieve a lot of the pressure. You are here to help, and everyone pitches in as much as they can.

We are building a barn ("Rome was not built in a day"), so the idea was to try to help people find these types of opportunities because, such hackathons, they're not necessarily extremely well advertised, or people maybe don't see the point firsthand. I would like to make even more of an effort to encourage them to come to hackathons and to experience them in a way that enables personal growth and connection - and hopefully acceptance and opportunities. This idea developed into a proposal we made one year ago to the Swiss Innovation Agency, and surprisingly enough, they accepted.

It was one of those blue-sky ideas. It was not something that had a very clear business model. Still struggling, actually very much, with the business model. But we got great support from organizations like Powercoders ^[3](^#fn:3⁾, Capacity ^[5](^#fn:5⁾ and Opendata.ch ^[1](^#fn:1⁾, in addition to the State Secretariat for Migration, to do this project.

Some people bought into the idea pretty quickly. Which also for me, it was important, through the experience of supporting refugees, to realize that how much systemic inequality there is in the system. We campaigned in Switzerland against special provisions that were not extended to refugees from the Ukraine who did not have Ukrainian citizenship. Meaning that people who lived most of their lives in Ukraine, when they fled like others, were not given the same level of protection.

These issues are unfair and divisive and so on. But, in such cases, it can be really hard to budge the system. There's an incredible amount of questionable treatment, and so we are trying to design this project as inclusive as possible. It has nothing directly to do with the war in the Ukraine. It has everything to do with people who are going through forced migration. And if things go well, I'd like to even open it up more, also to people who have migration backgrounds, minorities, and more.

But right now, it is focused on people that have an actual forced migration background? Like they need to be migrants in Switzerland, right?

Yes. So they need to have an acknowledged status as a refugee or be quite a way into the acceptance evaluation program of the Migration Office. They are actually ultimately deciding who gets to take part in our pilot or not. And they have very, as we know, strict criteria, algorithmic criteria, which is an interesting topic in itself.

The idea is that we would give the people who are accepted into the program a little bit of coaching and support. We will introduce them to topics like open data and hacking for social good. The project also comes from a series of hackathons, I forgot to mention, that we have been doing for years within the Universities of Applied Science. There is a network of universities organizing hackathons with and for charities. People come to a hackathon to work on challenges that were raised by charitable organizations. And mostly they are dealing with issues of poverty, issues of things that are uncomfortable for those of us who like to think that in an advanced country, all the problems are being taken care of.

These are hackathons where you can actually see a little bit of the gaps in the social services and where people are falling through, and so on. A very interesting series of events in itself. And it is this community out of which more research interest is emerging, which we are doing between Bern and Zurich at the moment.

And again, maybe we will also include other academic institutions in the future. We are presenting this next week at an international conference, so maybe there will even be collaborators overseas. You can go right now on https://hackintegration.ch/hackathons ^[2](^#fn:2⁾, and there you will find a map of Switzerland with an initial list of hackathons.

With this we are reaching out to hackathon organizers and saying: Put yourself on the map! Advertise yourself through our platform. I've been collecting lots of hackathons over the years, so I'm putting everybody there as well. From January, refugees can apply, and use the instruments to find hackathons that are accessible to them geographically or thematically, and get assistance and even financial assistance if needed for the transport to take part. And then we will evaluate the impact of this hackathon experience on their integration.

Okay, so basically you guide them through the hackathon experience. You might give them financial support, but the actual hackathon is outside of the project itself?

Correct. Right now, we are not organizing hackathons ourselves. Just reaching out to everyone who organizes hackathons. So automatically every one of our partners, and even including organizations that run private hackathons. You can put a hackathon in our database without having it advertised on our map. You can still recruit people, participants, for your event. We thought it was important that also internal events, because: why not have refugees take part? Bring in a very diverse, unexpected perspective, on your problems.

Diverse Teams and Healthy Competition

You did some work on the idea of diverse teams for hackathons, like how to find well-balanced teams and positive experiences from that, right?

Yes, not so much done work as much as doing work. Maybe just to step back a bit. As I said earlier, I have worked on setting up a lot of infrastructure for open data projects, and one of the central bits of infrastructure is a software platform that we call Dribdat ^[6](^#fn:6⁾. This is supposed to sound like the sound the basketball makes when it hits the ground. And it means "Driven by Data." The goal of the software is to better acknowledge people's contribution to a time-limited sprint. It could be a hackathon; it could just be development work.

Even if it is just your own project, that you are setting time aside for and you really want to see how much work you did across the different questions, topics you were working on. This tool, Dribdat, has replaced our old wikis, where we used to collect all the information from the open data community about different use cases and how they were creating apps and visualizations and research reports and so on that involved the use of open data, and developing it was part of our community outreach.

I tried to be very receptive to people's feedback and concerns. It was basically like it was just open source and very hackable from the beginning. And lots of people have contributed ideas to that platform, for which I'm infinitely thankful. Around 20 people contributed directly with code. Hundreds of people have contributed ideas and suggestions.

One of the best ideas I've ever received was from a person at a hackathon in Lausanne who came up and said: Look, you have such an opportunity there. You are putting this platform into people's faces. People who might be anxious about the experience they're about to have, people who are anxious about being social, being in a crowd. Of course, hackathons are about being in a crowd. And for many people, it's great; it's normal; it is what they seek. Yet a lot of people participate despite having some fears, anxieties, and maybe even reasons to think that they might not be well accepted. So that person told me, really, please: put a code of conduct in there, make it visible. So we did, we added the Hack Code of Conduct.

They said a thing about diversity, inclusion, and a no-tolerance policy on the platform. They were not specific about how to do it, so I went and did the research, this has been a topic for a long time. In 2013 I even proposed a panel at the Open Knowledge conference, which was not accepted, but we still had the conversations. It generated a lot of buzz, and it was clearly an topic for the community. There are several other communities that have been involved in similar conversations about ethics, about tolerance. It's never something that the leaders, the champions of a community seem to want to get behind... unless it's like women++ ^[7](^#fn:7⁾, an organization where "diversity matters" is the platform. For tech communities, this can be very uncomfortable, and we know that we have a diversity crisis in IT.

Yeah, it's a very well-known topic, I would say from open-source software, for example. A few years back, there were a lot of projects creating codes of conduct and so on, and a lot of talking about if it is needed or not, and very strong discussions with strong opinions.

I just don't want to take the credit for this, because I'm by the way a white CIS male. I'm not the one experiencing the discrimination and bullying and so on. It's not usually my voice that gets unheard inside of these events. So I remain just very grateful to people in the community who find the courage to suggest these kinds of things.

Now that you have the experience with organizing the hackathons and being involved on the immigration side of things... And that was what I was thinking of when you were saying people that might be anxious about the crowds they go into in these hackathons. Now you can be a voice for them in a sense. Do you think it's something that actually helps immigrants, or do you think the code of conduct is a positive influence on the hackathons you would send people into with your hack integration project?

It certainly has helped me. It's helped me to step in several times and try to calm people down by reminding them that they've made an obligation. It's not like a contract you sign. There are no penalties involved. I've never had to kick... Okay, maybe there was one time. But I mean, we generally don't have to kick people out for misbehaving.

You just need to nudge them. "Be more adult!"

Yeah. I feel it also sends like a signal.

I don't know if people even notice that rainbow color disclaimer. One other thing we recently tried is also an anonymous drop box. Having a form to fill out without having to state your name, mentioning that there was an episode of discrimination. And again, having that feature is something people are thankful for, even if it ever gets used.

It's a little bit about having communities that are willing to police themselves and that are able to protect their weakest members. The members that need protection need to get it, right? And people need to be told that protection is available. This is something that you would think is already in all our digital online clubs, a common feature. But I often have to remind people that this is important still.

Oh, and the other thing is, I'm also a big fan of sports. I've been playing ice hockey and skiing and winter sports since about as long as I can remember. I've always lived in the north, near the mountains. I love sports, but there's also this dream of sports. When I was living in Lausanne, where they have the International Olympic Committee and Olympic Museum and so on, you see this clearly, this spirit of the Olympics. Even though we see it breaking down from time to time, we still want to believe that people can settle their differences over a game of sport rather than hot conflict. Don't you wish those Ukrainians and Russians would just sit down and have a proper game of ice hockey and sort out whatever differences they have there in the Crimean?

This is what I also like to see at Hackathons, a healthy form of competition. It can get less healthy and more competitive when we get hyped up about the prize, people start closing in on themselves and not letting anyone watch. "What are you looking at my screen for?" This is really funny, you get to se people's behavior from across different institutions or backgrounds. We all have a different kind of behavior around privacy and about letting other people in on our work. And I often say that at hackathons, at least this is something I am learning from my research colleagues... Hackathons, like in terms of sociology, social theory, are very close to other forms of digital society.

Topics like digital nomadism and co-working spaces and public work, and even like blogging and tweeting about your work as it happens. Livestreaming, live casting your process. These are all very mutually supportive. Of course, it's not everybody's cup of tea. Can you imagine asking some kind of official to live stream their decision process? What about elected public officials; you might think, wow, they should really stream. And actually, they do, right? In Parliament, they livestream!

I mean, they have to. But sometimes I also think it depends on the expected reaction from the outside world. I feel that a lot of governments are not that happy having open data or livestreaming their decisions because they assume the reaction would be to highlight mistakes and be a negative reaction instead of like a positive.

And in hackathons or in like public work, you often have this positive feedback more, I feel. I at least can see that with something like publishing research data, for example, where you... I think a lot of scientists are afraid that people might look there for issues instead of building on their work positively.

Book Recommendations

At this point, I would just like to recommend three books on this topic. Probably the first one; the obvious one is the Open Revolution by Rufus Pollock ^[8](^#fn:8⁾. This is one of the very few books that really comes out of the open knowledge, open data community. We don't have many authors. I've even been thinking myself, maybe I should start writing a book or something, just because this is so rare. And while it's not been tremendously successful, it does talk about making this an open world, it talks pervasively about access to information. Noah Chomsky also has a lot of material like this, and I could name some books about subjects like WikiLeaks that have been quite influential. But I would really love to see more books like this. And I really support Rufus in that. He's been really instrumental for our community, despite fragmentation and disputes over this last difficult decade. But a lot of my modus operandi is still based on this very thin book.

The other books that have been influential for me over the years are the writings of John Ralston Saul, such as The Unconscious Civilization ^[9](^#fn:9⁾. He is a Canadian philosopher who talks a lot about similar topics, like equality and fairness. He talks at length about how Canada is a constructed, mythological concept. How people really assume that there's like a government and a native population and that's how the cards fall. He's able to break behind the mirror and see and show the other side.

There's also a Swiss philosopher that's been really influential for me over the last years, Alain de Botton. Kunst des Reisens ^[10](^#fn:10⁾, this is one of his many books. The School of Life ^[11](^#fn:11⁾, which is a super interesting project with lots of meaningful and very direct lessons that you can basically watch on YouTube, talks about very practicalities of surviving the digital age. I enjoy his writing, and I think it's great that we have good philosophers around.

Then this is more my wife's recommendation, I think, than mine, but Yuval Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century ^[12](^#fn:12⁾. Wow. The thing I love about this guy is how many people he pisses off. You gotta admire a philosopher who takes no prisoners, especially in the conservative parts. He gets positioned, maneuvered into being an explainer for big tech, and I think that's absolutely not the case. He's very philosophical, broad, humanist. It's interesting if you just look at what people think of his work. I think it explains all the confusion, misinterpretation of these kinds of tech politics. And I think it is very useful to us to use this as a lens to understand our frustrations from a different perspective.

So that's my tip of the day.

It's interesting to me how many people I meet in the open data space that recommend more philosophy books, for example, or politics books and so on. Like there's a very strong feeling I have that it's very engaged people in things like civic society, humanism, and improving the world.

Thinking Locally

Do you have some people to recommend that either, for example, I should reach out to for interesting insights into the ecosystem or people you would recommend other people, for example, follow that are interested in the whole ecosystem, Hackathons, maybe also the refugee integration idea?

One thought I would just like to say is that local impact, I believe, is much harder to achieve than global impact. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it was just my experience that working with the power leverage of a giant multinational corporation or powerful government is easier. Once you have the buy-in, once you've hyped people up enough, things move quickly. But if you want to win the trust of your local butcher and baker, you might need to spend decades winning their trust by showing up and engaging with them and being kind day after day after day. I think that this very much applies to the refugee problem.

There is systemic injustice at a very high level. But every day we have opportunities to be kind and supportive to people just down the street. Like in Europe today, we have refugees everywhere. There might not be acknowledged refugees under protection from the state. But we have people who are just forced to displace themselves because of reason X Y. And the more of these crises we have, pandemics, climate change, wars, that's just going to increase.

So I think this is the big challenge for our open community is to try to win the trust at a very local level. For that, we need to be more than just very symbolic and abstract and theoretical. People need to see the value in what we're doing. And there is generally a big interest in things being locally sourced. So why not locally sourced data as well? Why not be inspired by Fair Trade - in addition to paying people fairly halfway around the world, pay people fairly in your local neighborhood, help them to be more open.

There are actually great examples of that. I'm perhaps not the best reference, but try to look for that. Look for examples of communities that are creating shared infrastructure. You would find them, I think, in every large city, even smaller cities. Even at the local institution level of a school, you might have that one teacher that provides IT support. The open data part, is where you see it going beyond just software and hardware. More than the level of keeping people's data protected, we are also creating sharing platforms where people can trust each other or discuss things or have some exchange.

And I think this is the real distributed technology, not only the blockchain. Although that can also be very helpful and applicable. But that is the power of open, of open-source, and cheap hardware is that people can run their own infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa or in the middle of Switzerland.

For us, the other big challenge is definitely AI. Specifically, ADMS or Automated Decision Making Systems. In these technologies that affect us all, there is a lot of algorithmic injustice, and it's backed by data and statistics; an entrenched belief in a rational economy. It's not a first world problem. I think algorithmic injustice is absolutely everywhere in the world because you have this trickle-down macroeconomics, and they go hand in hand with this rational determinism, this old kind of colonialism. You know, "I know it better." The scientific worldview even is guilty of missionarism of all kinds.

I've been thinking for the past couple of years: what's next for open data? I know a lot of other people are doing the same. I mean within open knowledge. You can just check the blog. There have recently been vital conversations around open-source AI licenses. How do we decide whether an AI is open source or not? And a lot of debate in the community. I've started a notebook on open algorithms. I'm really inspired by the work of AlgorithmWatch ^[13](^#fn:13⁾.

They are active at a high level, as a think tank - they aim to talk to policymakers. I'm more interested in just collecting little bits of data and I have a GitHub project where I've collected a bunch of initiatives, platforms, and some research results ^[14](^#fn:14⁾. I could find few data sets like the one AlgorithmWatch recently started; they have this catalog of algorithms basically. Still relatively few sources of reliable information that help us to decide whether a particular brand of decision-making tool is what it's meant to be, the ethical and open-source aspect.

I might transform it into one of those awesome pages or some place where people can also contribute because right now, it's just more of a personal project. Just to be aware of things.

I told a journalist today about a developing story. I pick these things up a bit on social media and so on. We create echo chambers all the time. Open data is just like everything else, we have our own bubble. But I don't know, despite being in crowds of people all the time, in the middle of hackathons and all these online communities, I've been feeling a little bit isolated lately.

You know, with Trump and Musk and Putin, and all those other characters... People generally I think have a harder time reaching out. And I do think we are in a time where our networks are being tested more than anything. But, but I would just... like I said, talk to your local baker.

Talk to a local journalist. I don't know, I think people outside always assume open data and data journalism, data visualization, data journalism, data literacy, they're all so close together, and we're so in tune. It's really not easy, but it's really worth the effort.

Support Hacks/Hackers ^[15](^#fn:15⁾. It's a great organization that connects investigative and data journalists around the world. Take a look at what they're doing and join one of those public discussions, which are, at least in Switzerland, pretty regular. This is a nation of philosophical cafés. That's how I knew Switzerland. Before I came here, I couldn't even find it on a map. But I heard that these, like, Lenin, Trotsky characters back in the day, 100 years ago, they were gathering together and having the revolutionary ideas in some kind of Swiss wine cellar.

I think these traditions are very much alive. I try to take every chance I get to dip in. Even if you don't know anybody, people generally tend to have a lot of openness, and humorous situations emerge. It's especially valuable, I think, when we go into the process being reflective. Remember that anybody can be a journalist today: so many people like you, publishing, posting, podcasting, livestreaming. And it's surprising if you just go into a random café, how many people are going to write on social media about this conversation and being actually open to that and suggesting topics or stories is something we need to practice constantly.

We need to continue to develop an oral tradition. To rediscover this connectivity that people had before the written language. When we were passing stories down through generations and there was sort of a cohesiveness to these stories. They described the world systematically. One astrological constellation at a time or one deity at a time. So then you could build a temple. You could just systematically put all them, all your deities, in a line. Try to do that with the topics that we're discussing. It's lacking in the structure. Even though we love to talk about graphs and semantic web and all these ontologies in theory.

Well, we don't seem to have much of a guiding principle. And I feel that there's an opportunity now with emerging ways to interact with databases, with technology. I think we can use the opportunity to actually have smarter conversations. Have our AI agents talking in the background and syncing up our reading lists and saying, oh, okay, here's somebody you really should talk to next, Philip, because there's an 80% certainty that person will be your next interview candidate.

But, if we're not careful, things will get the best of us, and those AI agents will dominate the conversation pretty quickly because - let's be frank, we're only human, just limited in time resolution. There's only so many things I can say in an hour and 15 minutes, whereas the AI could compare gigabytes of information in that same period.

How To Connect With Oleg

At the very end, where can people find you? If they want to reach out to you, where should they go?

Well, I have a small office at the station in Köniz. So if you can find Köniz on the map, you can find me because I work most of the time right here, next to the train station ^[16](^#fn:16⁾. Besides that, I'm often in Bern, in Lucerne, in Zurich. I also try to go to western Switzerland as much as I can, just try to get around.

The easiest thing is to reach out to me by Mastodon at https://fosstodon.org/@loleg. I love distribute my thoughts on ActivityPub, it's the healthiest community for me right now. I try to be very responsive to direct messages and even mentions on Mastodon.

My website is inviting; you can actually book with an open calendar ^[4](^#fn:4⁾. You can just drop a slot in the calendar and completely noncommittally we can have a conversation.

I think a good way to connect with me would be through the activities of Opendata.ch ^[1](^#fn:1⁾. Come to the next hackathon and find me there. And the Open Knowledge Network ^[17](^#fn:17⁾, you can find me in the global directory ^[18](^#fn:18⁾, alongside activists around the world who are specialized in all manner of subtopics and usually quite happy to hear from people like you. I definitely recommend checking out Open Knowledge and joining our Open Data Day and other activities, where we celebrate the good that is in a world of algorithmic intolerance, and so on and on.

About Philip

I research open data and collaborative data engineering. In another life, I build custom software and consult on data science and software engineering. Sometimes, I create (mostly digital) projects for fun. For freelance work, project ideas or feedback, email me: philip@heltweg.org.