By Steve Alder, CEO, Telefonica Dynamic Insights at Telefónica Digital

Earlier this week Telefónica Dynamic Insights became a partner of the Open Data Institute (ODI). The ODI was co-founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee last year with support from the UK Government. It aims to drive economic growth through the application of open data.

So why have we joined?

We are excited about working with the ODI to explore how anonymised and aggregated data can be used in a responsible way to deliver benefits back to business and society.

We are kicking off our collaboration with a ‘datathon for social good’ at Campus Party – Europe’s biggest technology festival – at The O2 in London in September. Together with the ODI we will challenge the 10,000 ‘campuseros’ attending Campus Party to come up with innovative ways to use data to create solutions that benefits society. The data available to them will include existing open data sets on transport, health, education, and the environment.

There are a number of other areas where we are looking to work together with the ODI. This includes identifying government data sets that could help our product roadmap; exchanging skills and knowledge on how best to extract insights from large amounts of data; and supporting some of the data start ups the ODI are incubating at their offices in Shoreditch. It’s even possible that one or two of the start ups could join Telefonica’s start-up accelerator programme Wayra.

I look forward to sharing more with you about this exciting new partnership in the coming months.