State of Open Con 2025

To ensure the UK has an integrated energy sector, large quantities of high quality data are needed. This session looks at how the creation of a public sector and industry collaborative body has enabled data principles to achieve this.

This panel will discuss the benefits of intra- and inter-industry collaboration on Open Data to accelerate change and innovation, as well as drive industry adoption of Open Standards more broadly.

Let us fight ignorance and prejudice in the world by enriching the most important sources for generative AI — Wikipedia and Wikidata—with accurate information based on reliable and established sources.
And let us use AI to simplify and accelerate that process.
The end result will be an improvement of the most trustworthy foundational data that ChatGPT, Claude, and all other models rely on for their training.
With the help of truth, in the form of credible sources, we can combat misinformation, right-wing extremism, dictatorship, and Russian propaganda.

This talk will cover Green Web Foundation’s most recent open source project - carbon.txt.

In it Hannah will explain:

- The problem this project addresses - the difficulty in finding and using sustainability data that is already published into the public domain.
- The web-first, connect not collect style approach that underpins how it works and how it is designed to be extended by default.
- How people can get involved in using the code or data the project surfaces.

Imagine a Web where individuals truly control their personal data, where privacy, data portability, and user-centricity are foundational principles baked into the Web’s architecture. That’s the promise of Solid—a groundbreaking open-source initiative founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

In October 2024, the Open Data Institute (ODI) took stewardship of the project to foster the open-source community and drive global adoption. In this session, Louise Burke (CEO, ODI) and Jesse Wright (Solid Lead, ODI) will provide a brief technical overview of Solid, highlight its adoption across projects and industries, and outline how you can contribute to its growth. Whether you’re a developer, policymaker or c-suite executive, join us in building a user-centric Web.

Data lakes on open table formats like Iceberg are a popular way to manage large datasets for analytics, data science, and AI. This talk explains how data lakes work and how to adapt open source analytic stacks to use them. First, we'll tour projects like Arrow, Iceberg, and Unity Catalog that make data lakes possible. Next, we'll see how analytic engines like DuckDB, ClickHouse, and Spark are adapting. Finally, we'll survey a few projects that enable applications written in Python, Golang, or Rust to deliver fast query. You'll have to build the app yourself but this talk will show you a path to use data lakes and open source successfully.

The concept behind Stream emerged back in Spring 2020 when eight water companies came together and agreed that it was better to explore the potential of open data together rather than each going it alone. Roll forward to the end of 2024 and Stream is now a well-established collaborative initiative between 16 of the UK’s major water companies and seven partners all with a shared vision to unlock water data to the benefit of customers, society and the environment.

The member water companies have progressed from publishing three simple datasets at the end of 2023 to 69 datasets in just under 12 months, including near real time event data relating to the high profile topic of storm overflow discharges.

Solid data sharing foundations have been put in place (people, process, data and technology) and the strategy for 2025-2028 has been agreed. The icing on the cake came as Stream was recognised at the 5th Open UK Awards, being awarded winner of the Open Data category.

But it hasn’t been all plain sailing. We got lots of things wrong on the way.

As Stream members, we have actively sought out and benefited from learning from other data sharing initiatives so we wanted to take this opportunity to tell the stories of what we got wrong, what we learned and ultimately, how we got a few things right.