Is open data the key to empowering citizens?
A recent project with my company 9 Clouds and our local government has revealed a number of interesting things, namely that data needs to be shared. Governments at the local all the way to the national level have vast repositories of data that are meant to be public. Even though much of this data is available for reading, precious few data sets are machine readable. If the data can be machine readable, citizens can quickly pull data sets and create useful visualizations and use the data in ways that the data-collectors could never have dreamed of.
and this is the power of the commons. If the government merely acts as a gatherer, we can leave the interpretation up to citizens everywhere. As Tim Berners-Lee notes, this can create powerful changes as demonstrated in Haiti following the earthquake:
Haven’t had a chance to watch this TED talk yet but thought it was interesting you mention Google’s project which is actually a project of another TED Speaker Hans Rosling. Google invested in his program but actually hasn’t really done much with it, so interesting they released it.