Dublin has a bike rental scheme now, delivered by outdoor ad house JC Decaux, in exchange for outdoor ad real estate on streets.

JC Decaux recently forced Fusio, a 3rd party, to withdraw their mobile app which told people where their nearest bike station was, bikes available, and other good stuff. A few feathers were spat.

Firstly, I'm surprised that people thought JC Decaux would be fine with a 3rd party using their data. They are a private concern; they exist to make money. Fusio were benefiting, by putting an app available for download which piggybacked on it. Yes, I realise that Fusio were not charging for it. But there were clear commercial benefits to them in offering a free app. They are not a bunch of hippies (warning: assumption) and also exist to make money. There are opportunity costs for JC Decaux as well.

The key point is: it looks like Dublin City Council did not understand that this was a public data project, or did not see the inherent value of making this clear in their agreements.

Metadata about the project (i.e. location of bike stations, available cycles, and free spots) should have been the property of Dublin City Council. Instead that information is obviously the property of JC Decaux.

Government bodies and agencies: please care about your data (by that I don't mean care about data protection, that's a given).

Curate, collate and make it available. If you make appropriate public data accessible via an open and well-documented API, the market will do the rest.

If you don't want to listen to me, maybe listen to Tim Berners-Lee instead, via his TED video or article on the topic. Or just have a look at what they are doing in the UK.

I haven't used those bikes yet, but they look nice and people seem to smile a lot on them. So that's good.