Open Data Evolution | Blog | FutureGov - Transforming Government | Education | Healthcare

“RAW DATA NOW was the rallying cry issued by Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation in November 2007. Sir Tim Berners-Lee picked up the call in his landmark Ted talk from February 2009, and now, nearly five years on, Open Government and Open Data have become part of government operations for many countries around the world.  The open data community is essentially a hunter-gatherer world – finding food (data) and providing it to our families in the best way possible. The tribes have ways of sharing information on where good food can be found (#opendata on Twitter is a good source), but in some terrains (governments) food is hard to find, and it takes skill, experience, and cunning to be an effective data hunter.  Fortunately hunters are willing to share their findings, and provide signposts to help hunters find easy to gather food, although a lot of it has tough skin (pdf) and is of low (calorific) value.  Maps are emerging, but are not authoritative. Interoperability is sharing information on the design of the bow and arrow, through channels such as on Scraperwiki and G_Refine.  Humans first began the systematic cultivation of plants and animals between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, and the relative security provided by agriculture provided the incentive for most humans to live as farmers in permanent settlements.  The idea of farming and harvesting data is emerging in a few areas; two notable examples are OpenCorporates.com and the World Government Data Store, where farmers have planted crops from many terrains in one place.  The emergence of data geo-coding and Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives suggest that more facilities will be available to support agriculture.  The next phase of anthropological evolution saw the establishment of governments, complex economic and social structures with increasing specialisation, sophisticated language and writing systems, and distinct cultures and religions. The rise and fall of these cities, states and empires has happened across the world for the last 2,000 years.  Open Government Data has not yet moved into this stage, although some people are thinking what it might bring. Government is the world’s largest information business – from global organisations such as the UN to national, regional and local governments...  The promise of the semantic web, interoperability, and the 5 star scale of open data may be a pointer to a future...  While this future may be decades away, an emerging community of “farmers” are sharing practices and constructing a series of helpful guides on how to approach data management. If you want to move beyond being a hunter gatherer of data, you should look at the guides that are under construction, and contribute your experience to the community. Here are three sources that you may find useful. [1]  Semantic Community is a wiki dedicated to using and promoting Data Science - ‘It is not just where you put your data (cloud), but how you put it there...’ [2] The Data Wrangling Handbook is a crowdsourced ‘textbook’ from the School of Data, supported by the good folk at the Open Knowledge Foundation... [3] The Guardian data blog has been doing some great work on visualising data about the Olympics. Last year Tim O’Reilly wrote a short piece for Forbes on the topic of the ‘World’s 7 Most Powerful Data Scientists.’ More interesting than the fact that the list actually contains ten names, is the fact that they are all from the USA..”