These are interesting boondoggles. I like that they both consist of little more than scrapping some data and then displaying them with tool that gives a nice view. Almost the definition of fun - low energy in, high energy out.
I was explaining to my son how whenever you map something, or collect statistics on something and display them observers rush to conclusions about "them". "Oh look, he certainly is an outlier." or "Humm, quite a crowd over there!" He seems wise for his age: "The dangers of data."
Nice quote from a recent article in the Boston Globe:
While most of your embarrassing baggage was already available to the
public, it was effectively off-limits to everyone but the professionally
intrepid or supremely nosy. ...
It's the collapse of inconvenience," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant
professor of culture and communication at New York University. "It turns
out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't
realize it."
I agree that data emergence is a better model than front loading things like this with a knowledge management design process.
So in sum I find the navel gazing an interesting way to bring some smart people with unique skills to work on these problems of privacy, emergence, and community analysis.
An interesting design space - but _yeah!_ data is dangerous.
So one possible awnser to the question is: check it into committers someplace and see if you can get a community to begin to emerge. The privacy issues can be used as cover for not going more public at this stage :-).
- ben
ps. In case your not already aware the ivory tower dudes are having a field day with all the data in "our logs". For example this data about power law distributions in the logs.
http://fiachra.soc.arizona.edu/blog/archives/000257.html#000257
or more generally:
http://opensource.mit.edu/
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