A year ago I recommended that Hong Kong step up efforts to build a wider data community and ecosystem, promote data literacy for all and appoint a chief data officer to champion open-data initiatives.
I want to review if my three recommendations remain valid given recent developments.
Building a vibrant data community and ecosystem was my first recommendation.
Open data is a key enabler of open innovation because it helps communities communicate with each other.
It can encourage people to innovate and create products that make data lively.
An example is Plume Labs, a French startup, which combines open data on air quality with consumer-grade devices to achieve 90 percent correlation with advanced reference monitors in benchmark air quality tests for 18 cities in Europe.
Here, the data community has yet to gather momentum, despite some nonprofits having set up to connect the data community, such as Hong Kong Data Science Society and Impact Data Consortium Chain.
In July, world-renowned scholars - including Turing award winner John Hopcroft and world-class AI entrepreneur Lee Kai-Fu - joined the first HK Tech Forum on Data Science and AI, a platform initiated by City University president Way Kuo. This high-level forum helps connect us to the wider data community at large.
More should be done to connect our data community and communicate our success stories.
This will create a thriving ecosystem that encourages stakeholder and public engagement that will in turn help more people understand the benefits of open data.
Promoting data literacy for all was my second recommendation.
It is the ability to explore, understand and communicate with data.
However, not everyone has the skills required to understand the world around them by means of data.
According to Forrester's research, 70 percent of employees are expected to work heavily with data by 2025 - up from just 40 percent in 2018.
Data is the fuel of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and knowing how to work with data is more important than ever for employees in the workplace.
Open data creates opportunities to increase the level of data literacy in the workforce by raising public awareness of data skills.
The Singaporean government advocates data literacy among public officers through a slogan: bringing data into the heart of digital government. It aims to build a digital relationship with citizens that is anchored in a deeper understanding of their needs and aspirations through data.
Given its huge impact and vast scope, the government should promote data literacy for all via schools and universities, fostering an understanding of ethical data use.
Finally, I recommended the appointment of a chief data officer to champion open-data initiatives.
The growth of "smart cities" has contributed to unprecedented data collection, production, and analysis demands facing national and local governments today.
In response, world cities like London, New York, Shenzhen, and other locations in the Greater Bay Area have recently instituted a city-level CDO initiatives to improve their data governance and stewardship.
Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said in his policy address that Hong Kong will explore, with the mainland, arrangements for a two-way flow of data with a view to jointly promoting the coordinated development of smart cities in the GBA.
There's a pressing need to appoint a CDO to champion innovative data sources and drive cross-government decisions. The mix of a data specialist, a business strategist and a policy professional makes an ideal fit for this role.
Building a data ecosystem, advocating data literacy for all, and appointing a city-level CDO will help Hong Kong gain a competitive edge in the digital economy.
Dr Jolly Wong is a policy fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge
caption here
