When I was at BCU the other week I gave a presentation to Dave Harte‘s MA in Social Media students about open government data. We spoke about why open government data is a relevant topic for public organisations at the moment. Then we looked at different approaches to exploit the possibilities of open data, and I spoke about some of my experiences of doing this with Digital Birmingham. Finally we discussed why open data was a relevant topic for a course about social media.

Because I was worried this was all going to be a bit dry, I started off by showing them this video by Mark Flood.

I was quite pleased to find this video. It is well produced and is lovely and enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by open data. It also has a very low number of views on YouTube, so I could be confident that the students probably hadn’t seen it before.

Once I’d shown it, I went on to say that while it is a useful introduction to what open data is it is also somewhat naive and idealistic about the benefits.

As well as the students who attend in the room, Dave also has a number of international students that he records his lectures for. So, if anybody is interested in the whole presentation plus discussion it’s available in the video below.

Many thanks to Dave for the opportunity to do this. Anybody who does listen to the presentation will also realise how kind and helpful he was by putting what I was talking about in context for the students when I didn’t do that very well.

And thanks to the students who were interested, attentive and asked some intelligent questions.

Finally, if you just want to look at the slides they are up on Slideshare