State of Open Con 2025

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.