One presentation that stuck with me from the conference was the one delivered by Mr Jan Willem Verkiel – Manager of the Harbourmaster Policy Department from the Port of Rotterdam.


He espoused the need for transparency and sharing of information so the industry can learn from such incidents and apply prevention measures to make shipping safer.


He shared that the port administrates accidents and incidents and has done so since 1988 (maybe even longer); so they have at least 10 years’ worth of statistics with the quality and completeness of the data improving year on year.


The Port of Rotterdam then started to share data on incidents and accidents with the Netherland’s Ministry of Transport from 2004. That was when they had a dispute with the Ministry because it was the only port in the Netherlands that provided the national accident database with realistic numbers.


care


And instead of rewarding the Port of Rotterdam for sharing such valuable information and data, they were instead ‘blacklisted’ as an unsafe area in the Netherlands!


44 | The Report • December 2017 • Issue 82


Fortunately, the Port of Rotterdam stood their ground and with (what I can imagine) countless discussions, the Port made its point on sharing data, prompting other ports to do the same – which then allowed the Ministry to report within the right context.


The issue was (obviously) that they appeared unsafe based on the report that was published on a national level.


Whereas in actual sense it was quite the opposite and with the intense data gathering and sharing they had further developed safety awareness instead!


Then why is it so hard to get people to share these data?


Is it a generation thing? That the earlier generation who grew up without the internet – they feel more protective of the data they generate? As it was it the past – knowledge gives the owner a competitive advantage.


Or is there just no right platform for doing so? Who is coordinating such efforts? How about sharing data across different nations? Would it be different say just sharing data between different states?


Maybe it is about the ease of being able to share that data?


With the data protection act being enforced country by country, it is not just a matter of clicking a ‘share’ button – but a tedious process of obtaining permission and consent.


Fortunately (or unfortunately), this is a problem not unique to the maritime industry. This affects many other industries too, noticeably more so in the scientific, academic and medical community. And what prevents the data flow are almost the same reasons that the maritime industry faces; not wanting to give others a competitive advantage, lack of acknowledgement and security concerns on how the data is being handled.


Good, well curated data is valuable. Uber knows that. Facebook knows that. And their data are monetised and sold to companies for huge sums of money.


But to gain a bigger picture and to progress our industry collectively – we need to change our mind-set to help the industry step up. This data needs to be shared for free.


enough


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