How Open Data Can Revolutionize a Society in Crisis – Brink – The Edge of Risk

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-03-28

Summary:

"The impacts of opening data are as myriad as the analytical uses of data. Open data sometimes achieves greater government accountability. In the United States, at the federal level, open data facilitated the creation of USASpending.gov, a set of online tools for exploring the federal budget. At the local level, open data drives various 'open checkbook' websites; in Austria, for example, over eight hundred municipalities have made their spending data more transparent and easy to visualize online.

Opening local government data about public works in Zanesville, Ohio revealed a fifty-year pattern of discriminatory water service provision. While access to clean water from the City of Zanesville water line spread throughout the rest of Muskingum County, residents of the predominantly African-American area of Zanesville, Ohio were only able to use contaminated rainwater or to drive to the nearest water tower and truck water back to their homes. Opening the data laid the truth bare and led to a successful civil rights lawsuit against Zanesville in 2008.

[...]

Although government transparency is important, the potential impact of open data is broader. Open data can have an impact on the accountability of private organizations and institutions. For example, several states are moving to release data collected on doctors about their opioid pain medication prescribing patterns. By showing doctors their own practices in comparison to those of other doctors, open data can change the behavior of less responsible prescribers. Arizona is already showing a ten percent reduction in opiate prescriptions and a four percent reduction in overdose deaths in those counties that used open data in this fashion, compared to counties that did not.

Open data also enables the creation of tools to improve consumer choice and citizen decision-making in the marketplace. Government-mandated labels that have given new-car buyers information on estimated miles-per-gallon for years were recently redesigned to make this information even more transparent and useful to consumers. And data collected by the government from universities has been transformed by the Department of Education into a calculator—the College Scorecard—to help parents and students make more informed financial decisions about their college education.

Sometimes the benefits of open data ripple out beyond the immediate motivations for disclosure. For instance, while publishing government contracts can boost public integrity, it can also catalyze greater business competition and entrepreneurship. Think of the wealth and jobs created by government’s release of both weather data and geo-locational data, which enabled weather apps and GPS devices, respectively. The Open Data Institute notes that the global market for open data could be as high as $5 trillion. Now, thousands of companies worldwide use open government data as a core business asset."

Link:

http://www.brinknews.com/how-open-data-can-revolutionize-a-society-in-crisis/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.data

Date tagged:

03/28/2017, 18:25

Date published:

03/28/2017, 14:25