”Open data belongs to the people”,
Project Manager Tanja Lahti enlightens Urbaria members about the benefits of open data and how it can spur innovations as well as advance transparency and democracy in governance. City of Helsinki collects massive amounts of data that has traditionally been supporting the decision making, planning and execution of public power. These datasets have now been gradually opened to the general public.
Helsinki Region Infoshare combines all the available open datasets from the Helsinki region in one location. Open data is offered in various subjects from historical residential data to welfare statistics and 3D models of the city to live data on tram routes. This data can be used freely under the Creative Commons license. It may be utilized by residents and businesses, but it can also come handy in academic research.
”We hope you use it and teach your students to use it”,
Research Director Katja Vilkama sums up the wishes of the city executive office. Digitalization has made its way to the city administration also in the way of new publication forms. Vilkama explains how Helsinki has changed to online formats in some of the annual reports that were formerly published in paper an ink: “These websites are renewed once a year, as were their traditional predecessors, but partial datasets are downloaded online as soon as they get ready”.
This new publication strategy means that we get to see the up-to-date data as soon as it gets prepared. Some of the datasets, such as the Helsinki Well-being Database, also contain ready to use diagrams and statistic charts that can be downloaded for free.
Vilkama brings up additional collaboration possibilities with the city: “It is possible to negotiate about the rights of closed datasets for academic research projects. If you need to use data that is not openly available, please don’t hesitate to contact us”.
Handy tips for the road
PhD students and Postdocs can apply for the City of Helsinki Research Grant. The application system is open until March 6th. The infromation is in Finnish, but application forms can be found at the bottom of the page also in English.
City of Helsinki has an Urban research and statistic library in Hakaniemi. This library holds Helsinki and urban studies related publications and houses a statistic information service that help citizens and researchers alike with city related statistics.
Download Katja Vilkama's slides here:
and Tanja Lahti's presentation here.
Photos: Olli Siitonen