Public-private collaboration to create value from the data

Public-private collaborations could be defined as long-term contracts between a government agency and a private entity with the objective of providing a public asset or service. The private party assumes a significant part of the responsibility and the risks, and generally get the possible benefits.

Although this type of collaboration has been successfully implemented in some of the most traditional and solid sectors, such as big public infrastructures, it has not yet been explored in depth in data area. However, public and private entities share interest in accessible, cost effective and high quality data. For that reason, they begin to explore new opportunities thought these collaboration models when sharing and exploiting data, taking advantage of the potential use of private data to solve public problems, especially in Smart Cities area.

An increasing number of private companies - even leaders in their respective sectors such as Thomson Reuters, Arup or Syngenta - are carrying out their own data-opening projects. Even complete sectors, such as the pharmacy sector, begin to rethink their current practices and to operate more openly their research data in order to accelerate development and approval of new medicines. Thanks to this greater openness, new ways of collaboration with public organizations are also emerging (we have already written in this article). These formulas go even beyond the traditional models of public-private collaboration, in order to integrate participants from different sectors. These participants can create value from data exchange through different formulas such as: Data Cooperatives or Pooling, Prizes and Challenges, Research Partnership, Intelligence Products, Application Programming Interfaces and Trusted Intermediaries.

On the other hand, the types of collaboration will also change based on the different roles that the public sector can play in these alliances, whether as a data producer, project promoter, partner or client. For example:

• Orange offers city governments information collected through their mobile networks, using its Flux Vision service, and Strava does something similar through its new Strava Metro business line, collecting data from the millions of athletes that use its applications.
• The new mobility companies, such as Waze, Uber or Blablacar, also work in collaboration with different governments through programs such as Connected Citizens or Uber Movement, offering complementary services that authorities cannot offer, generally in exchange for certain benefits.
• Collaborative platforms such as PRIDE, driven directly by the public sector through the SIMILE program, seek to group different data sources – both public and private – to improve management of basic services. such as energy in this case. France follows the path previously opened by the Netherlands through its open data project by the administrator of national electricity distribution network.
• Catalog, on the other hand, is a platform that includes information from different public information sources with the aim of creating an international repository with all types of mobility data. These data become part of the common good.

As we have seen through the previous examples, the public-private collaboration model is also opening up in the field of data. However, these new collaborations can also lead to new challenges in terms of the expectations of each of the parties. It will be necessary to analyse this challenges in order to offer adequate solutions in areas such as standards, interoperability, infrastructures, access to data, intermediaries and definition of collaboration strategies. And there are even those who say that these collaborations in terms of data and their availability improvement could end the need for many of the most traditional public-private partnerships.

Content prepared by Carlos Iglesias, Open data Researcher and consultan, World Wide Web Foundation.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.